


Home From Far

by BlueMaple



Series: Harry Potter and the Road Not Taken [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: A.A. Milne, AU, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Bromance, Catholic Character, Catholic Character of Color, Catholic Imagery, Catholic rituals, Character Development, Cursed Child references, Dimension Travel, Do-Over, Dueling, East of the Sun, Epic world building, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Ghosts, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Compliant, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lethifolds - Freeform, M/M, NO religion bashing, Parallel Universes, Prequel, Prophecies, References to if not actual violence, Sailing to Byzantium, Sequel, Series, The Boy With Kaleidoscope Eyes, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, The Princess Bride References, The Strange Familiar, Time Travel, Time Turner (Harry Potter), Trauma, Warding, West of the Moon, Young Harry, Young Neville, long fic, lots and lots of swearing, obscurials, slow building, solace
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-05-17 14:21:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 63,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14833916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMaple/pseuds/BlueMaple
Summary: In Which We Return to Little Harry and Little Neville. Picks up immediately after 'West of the Moon, East of the Sun' on CanonWorld, and the boys' realization that their world's would-be saviors have Buggered It All Up Bigtime. To be read following Ep. 4 - "Solace'.Lots o' backstory for the series.





	1. Realizations

**Longbottom Manor**

**Lancashire, England**

**March 28th, 2117**

 

On the fifth day after nine-year-old Neville Longbottom crossed all of time and space to save his world - the third day after his counterpart's son, Frankie Longbottom, sent out the global all-call that that world was now in probable vital danger as the result of his own world's saviour-complex-slash-half-arsing-of-their-cross-dimensional-details - half of South America, it seemed, descended upon England in indignation and rage: wave upon wave of feather, fin, scale, claw, tooth and nail, all dark and shining and tangle-eyed as the soul of the heated jungles that its children carried with them.

England, of course, met them at the door: politely and hospitably at first, but things started degenerating rapidly as soon as the representatives from all the rest of the other countries and continents involved in the Project started Apparating in. All were armed with a dazzling array of completely uneducated and unhelpful opinions, and not one of them brought so much as a single chocolate frog as a host or hostess gift.

"Rude," Potter observed disapprovingly (and loudly) as he and Longbottom passed through the overflowing kitchens on the night after the North American delegations arrived. "Alright, Stella can provide her own flowers, and Frankie's richer than all of them put together and can afford his own wine and party puds, but still. It's the _principle_ of the thing. Aunt Petunia," he said self-righteously (and even more loudly), "would be _appalled."_

" _I'm_ appalled," Longbottom of Longbottom said, if not loudly, then in his best imitated projected ringing tones of one Lucius Malfoy, and with his Gran's best disapproving sniff thrown in for good measure. "Honestly, is this what our future holds, Potter, because I can't write about it this way if it is! Imagine the uncivilized literary example it would set for the children, never mind the potential traumatic involved! Why, in terms of even the most basic and essential etiquette, it's positively post- _apocalyptic!"_

" _Un_ acceptable," Potter agreed as they made their way around the Manor and through the external door to Potter's tower, sniggering madly together (though Longbottom did wait till they were out of sight of the crowds). "And for the record? That last bit was in extremely poor taste. Well done, you!"

"Thank you," Longbottom said modestly. "Though again for the record? I meant it."

"So did I," Potter said. "They even got to the ginger newts behind the Mr. Smiley's enviro-cleaning fluid in the cleaning cupboard! Ap- _palling,_ I say! And the absolute worst bit? They didn't even clean up the crumbs! They left the _crumbs_ , Longbottom! In the _cleaning_ cupboard! They just _left_ them there! For the _house-elves!_ With the broom and pan right _there,_ never mind that Vanishing charms are a mere fourth year spell!"

"What _are_ they teaching in schools these days," Neville agreed as they climbed the spiraled staircase. His own room was still available to him, of course, but as his loo shared a hot water pipe with the main guest bath on the floor, and as he was, as of yet unable to charm his shower hot at will, the two boys were sharing quarters for the interim. It had been Potter's suggestion, put forth as soon as he'd digested the implications of the problem... Potter did not approve of cold baths any more than he approved of crumbs in the cleaning cupboard or guests who arrived without food in hand to replace and bolster the household's (and by extension, his pockets') reserves.

That being said, and no matter the general mayhem, all of the South American hordes, at least. and insofar as the boys were concerned, were polite enough: gentle and reassuring, though whenever they were out of sight, if not earshot, the infuriated roaring aimed at the rest of the contingents promptly returned to the epic. As the roaring translated primarily in Portuguese and Spanish, Neville and Potter weren't privy to the specifics, but it wasn't exactly hard for them to gather the gist either. 'We told you so' was more of a matter of intonation over pronunciation in any language, and the message was coming through loud and clear.

"They were all against the Project from the start," Frankie told them, the fourth night after everyone had begun to arrive. The immediate family was all hiding out together in the smallest sitting room, and the sorrow and fatigue on his face was temporarily on leave, given way to worry, outright exhaustion, and profound irritation. As naturally expansive, genial and hospitable as he was, even he, as Head of Longbottom, had his limits - directly correlative, at this point in time with his lack of ability, given that he was what the locals called a Low-Maj, or a wizard of minimal magical talent, to quickly, easily and magically clean up his Manor. "The whole Hernandez de Silva clan. They were kind with it to the immediate family because we were immediate family;  Uncle Harry was as good as Mig Silva's son, even if he was the only one who never realized it, and Mig was _de facto_ head of the family after his adopted father 'Tonio died. As that head, he held their first and primary loyalty. So it got a bit complicated after he died, you see, twelve years before Uncle Harry first presented his ideas on the Project to the ICW, because no one who survived Mig or followed him was quite sure how to tell his adopted son how bad a mistake they thought that he was making, especially after he'd helped avenge Mig's parents from the lethifolds. Everybody else in the world knew exactly what they all thought, in excruciating, exacting detail, but Uncle Harry had saved them, you see? Saved everyone, but with Mig's parents involved.... It was a family issue. A matter of respect. Absolute respect, and they just... Didn't know how to tell him that they thought he'd gone totally off his nut, especially since he wasn't Catholic, or even Christian, formally anyway, so they couldn't pull the You're-Playing-God card as effectively as they might have otherwise."

"But _why_?" Neville said, bewildered. " _Why_ were they against it? Didn't they _want_ our war stopped? Didn't they _want_ our world to be saved?'

"The saved world was a bit of a metaphor in this case," Scorpius Malfoy said. At a hundred eleven, he was yet straight-backed, fine-boned and slim: a bit fragile and delicate in his aged state, but yet the image, structurally speaking, of Auntie Niss. Other than his height and build though, he was all Malfoy: pale hair gone silver rather than white, grey eyes and triangular features. The defining and joyous enthusiasm for life, the boundless and overt puppy-like energy, and the chronically soft and silly expressions on the other hand, were just disconcerting. Charming, but disconcerting, never mind the silly and affected little monocle.... Neville rather suspected that the monocle, at least, was a joke, but as Potter said, with the wealth of three more months' exposure to the man in question, One Could Never Quite Tell With Scorp, and there was the accompanying maxim besides - It's Really, Really Better Not To Ask.  "It didn't end literally, after all, did it, after Riddle's war? _Their_ world ended: our grandparents and parents' world  I mean, but _the_ world went on." He gestured around. "Broken, changed... Diverted, maybe... Who knows what God intended, really? He didn't instigate or enjoy the evil fallout, I'm sure, any more than He did the lethifolds, but... Free will, right? He works with what we  give him. What we offer forth: with what we do to ourselves and each other."

Potter rolled his eyes a bit at that.  Potter and God, Neville thought, were more than obviously not on not-speaking terms the way He and Neville were... The other boy just didn't have context for theological musings, not on that bi-weekly ten-to-eleven-thirty basis anyway, never mind all  the religious, and religiously delivered, opinions offered up every evening following.

"What about my parents?" he persisted. "Why didn't they want _them_ saved?"

There was a sudden awkward silence at that…

And the entire conversation was abruptly put on hold, courtesy of a rather patently fabricated and trumped-up excuse involving the sudden necessity of helping the Master of the House mind his soup pots. Neville could tell that they all hoped that if they just let it go he'd forget to bring it up again, and his eyes narrowed in his sweet, round face as he watched them all retreat collectively to the kitchen, veritably shoving each other in their haste to get out the door first.

"They're relying on your manners to take note that the subject makes them uncomfortable," Potter observed from where he was sprawled across the squashiest sofa and methodically licking the insides off of an entire packet's worth of chocolate sandwich biscuits. "You're not going to let them get away with it, are you?"

"Hardly," Neville said. "Only I haven't got my answer yet, have I?"

"I could tell you."

"I'm sure you could, Potter, but I don't want to hear it from you. I want to hear it from _them._ Refusing to answer a perfectly reasonable question because it makes you uncomfortable when the lack of an answer is obviously making your guest uncomfortable is an exercise in complete self-indulgence, never mind self-prioritizing, _e.g._ selfishness, poor hospitality, and cowardice. I don't believe in encouraging any of those things."

"Did your _Graaaaan_ teach you that one?" The tone, while ostensibly teasing, was not... quite… disparaging, but then again, that nasty little gleam considered, the tone wasn’t necessary. Potter, Neville had noticed, might not much like any of their current hosts, but there was something else there that had become increasingly apparent over the last few days… He really didn’t like _sharing_ them either. He understood it intellectually; Stella had pulled him aside at one point and gently explained that in Potter’s personal context, sharing was a completely foreign concept - either he had something or someone else did; there was no middle ground - but understanding it didn’t make Potter’s version of self-expression there any easier to take.

 _Or_ to suppress the urge to slap that gleam, and the accompanying challenging _smirk,_ right off of his smug little face.

"No," Neville said shortly. "She didn't."

"Who, then?'

The nine-year-old Head of House Longbottom turned to Look at him silently. Potter doe-eyed limpidly back at him, that devilish emerald glint dialed up to maximum. "I know it prolly makes you uncomfortable to answer it," he said with patently false sweetness. "But I'm just _aching_ to know. _Really._ "

And with that... Something inside Neville snapped.

"It's alright. Bellatrix Lestrange said it," he said coolly. "After she burnt my father's tongue out of his head That Night - the fourth time - and right before she flayed him alive for not being able to offer her up the information she wanted from him on how you defeated Riddle."

Potter's hand stilled abruptly, his own tongue half out as he prepared to lick the filling off his seventh biscuit. He stared, paralyzed, green eyes enormous and genuinely stricken. Neville stared back coldly. After a long moment, Potter's gaze dropped, and he twisted his scrawny little hands together, seemingly heedless of the crushed biscuit within, and stared at his bony little knees.

"M' sorry," he muttered almost inaudibly. "That was rude of me."

And Neville was suddenly and deeply ashamed, more deeply ashamed than he'd ever been in his entire short life. He hesitated, then came to sit beside him, on the bare edge of the sofa.

"I'm sorry too," he said, equally quietly. "That wasn't fair of me. At all. It wasn't your fault, Potter. At all. It never was. She was evil all on her own, without anyone's help."

They sat in silence.

"You can keep sharing my tower if you want," Potter said finally, not looking at him. "After everyone goes, and you get your hot water back. If you leave your stuff in your room, anyway. I don't like clutter."

"Neither do I," Neville confessed. "Gran thinks I'm naturally tidy, but too much stuff around me just makes the inside of my head feel sweaty. A Mind Healer would probably say I'm projecting there."

"Are you?'

"No. It's because I cultivate a deliberately clumsy demeanor to go with my stutter, so people think I'm stupid and don't ask too many questions. So I have to trip now and again, and tripping hurts, and the less stuff is around, the longer I can reasonably go between. Can I ask you a question now? It's not rude, I promise."

"I s'pose."

"Do you sing like you do on purpose?”

"Huh?"

"You sing. All the time. Or hum, or whatever. All the time. It sounds really nice. You have a really nice voice. As nice as some of the choir boys at St. Paul's. You could join up after we go home, you're quite good enough, you know. Gran would totally support you if your guardians gave you permission to come with us."

He blinked as Potter stared at him uncertainly... Then actually, actually _blushed. Violently._

"Don't you know you do it?” Neville asked curiously.

"I did it at the Dursleys," he muttered. "But only in my head. They didn't like it. I reckon maybe it's because when I came through I cracked my skull, and now it all leaks out."

"Well, I like it. Don't stop on my account."

And he watched, fascinated, as Potter blushed again and shoveled himself back into the corner of the sofa.

"That quote you said earlier," Potter said suddenly. "'What do they teach them in schools these days.' That's from the Narnia books, right?'

"Yeah. The first one. Why?'

"Have you read the fourth one?”

"Sure. Dad has the whole set."

"And you remember it? All of it?'

"Yeah."

"Can you tell it to me? I've read all the others but that one. The library at the school didn't have it. Frankie was going to take me to the book shops this weekend to get it, but then..." He waved vaguely.

"You just want me to tell it to you because it has dragons in it."

"It _does?"_ The smaller boy sat up, patently delighted. "Really? You're not just taking the piss?'

"No. I mean, yes it does, and no. I'm not."

"Tell it to me, tell it to me!" Potter begged. "Please-please- _pleeeeease?"_

"Not _here,_ Potter! There are too many people coming in and out."

"C'mon then." He slid down, gathering up his biscuits and stuffing them in his pockets. "We'll go get the rest of your things and go to my tower."

"I thought I wasn't allowed to bring my stuff."

"You can have one of my pockets," he allowed magnanimously. "I'll empty one for you. You can keep things in there."

"It's alright. I don't mind keeping it all separate."

"I won't touch any of it, I promise."

"It's not that," Neville said, after a moment.

"Then what?"

"If I move all my stuff in with you, they'll give my room to somebody else. And I like having my room. It's good to have a place to go, to sort things out. I have a lot of stuff to sort out, every day."

"They're not going to take it _away,_ Longbottom! It's _yours!_ I'll tell them not to though, for you, if you don't want to and want to be sure."

Neville rubbed his eyes. Changing one's bad habits, he reflected, was all very well, but the problem there was that once you got properly started with it...  Once people were aware that you'd started it...

You weren't allowed to _stop._

"I have bad dreams sometimes, Potter," he said bluntly. "About That Night. I know when they're going to happen; it's alway when I have a bad day, with too much stuff to sort. At home, I tell the house-elves to put silence spells up on those nights so I don't wake up Gran, or Uncle Algie, and I just tell them they're not allowed to tell anybody, every time, so they don't know. I don't want to wake you up."

"Oh," Potter said. "Alright. Well, that's alright. Are you going to have bad dreams tonight?'

"No. I'm not used to having lots of people around, and it's tiring. Whatever I've got to sort out right now is just going to have to wait."

"Yeah," he agreed, and when they'd done collecting Neville's things for the next day and had made their way up to the tower, they'd taken turns washing up and changing in the loo... Potter climbed into the big bed, shoving the bedclothes back. Round the other side, Neville climbed in as well, lying a bit gingerly yet beside him. It was, he had to admit, a very comfortable bed, with plenty of room, and had more than the one redeeming feature... Even as they arranged the blankets, the glass shifted, the room darkened suddenly, and as the ceiling glassed over as well, they were flooded in swathes of starlight.

"That's brilliant," he said, as he'd said every night since the first night he'd seen it. "Just... Brilliant."

"Yeah," Potter agreed, as he had in response on every one of those same nights, and rolled on his side, thunking at his pillows. "It is. Story?"

Neville settled back, and sorted through his mental bookshelves. Potter squirmed in anticipation.

"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader," he began. "By C.S. Lewis. Book Four of the Chronicles of Narnia. Chapter One: The Picture in the Bedroom. 'There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.'"

“They’d never survive a day on Privet Drive,” Potter said disparagingly. “Though it’s still better than Dudley _Durrrr-_ sley. And he does deserve it. _For_ the record.”

"Eustace Clarence liked animals," Neville continued, ignoring that. "'Especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card.'"

“Isn't _that_ lovely!”

"'He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.'

“In. For. May. Shun,” Potter repeated. “Nope. Not on Privet Drive. Fat children, yes. Exercise? Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”

“In. Ter. _Up._ Shuns,” Longbottom repeated back. “Im. Po. _Lite._ Haven’t we had this conversation already?”

“It’s not interruptions. I’m _expressing_ myself." Potter smirked at him in the cascading, rippling starlight.

“Mm. 'Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins the four Pevensies, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy -'”

“Bet they disliked him right back.”

"'But he was quite glad when he heard that Edmund and Lucy were coming to stay. For deep down inside him he liked bossing and bullying; and, though he was a puny little person who couldn't have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors.”

“Or if they’re not.”

“Looberries,” Longbottom agreed. “Or powdered glass-nettle, soaked three times and dried between.”

“Ooooh! What does _that_ do?”

"‘Loads and loads of sound and fury signifying nothing. You dust it over the powdered sugar on the shortbread biscuits at tea: the ones that Gran never eats because the sugar gets all over her dress, and you never eat because they’re rubbish, and Uncle Algie stuffs down like they’re the cure for stupidity, and when he starts feeling unsettled you brew the tea with the looberries. The combined effect delays the effect of the looberries and gives him just about an hour between the time to hit the pub with his blokes, and the time it takes him to humiliate himself in front of the Leaky Cauldron, and again in front of the goblins when he goes down to take out enough money to bribe emergency Obliviators. Nobody obliviates goblins.”

It took a moment for that to process fully.

“What the bleeding hell did he do to deserve _that?”_ Potter said in awe.

“Dropped me out a third story window to jump my magic. I bounced, but still. Gran _cried_. And it wasn’t because she was happy either. Gran doesn’t cry when she’s happy; she just gives me second desserts.”

"Ah. What kind of desserts?" Potter asked, diverted.

"Everything but rice pud. She tried to make me eat it once, but only once. I sicked up all over the house-elf."

Potter guffawed. Loudly.

"You're alright, Ace," he said. "Alright. Go on. I won't interrupt again, I promise. Wait, before you go on, one question. What kind of dragons are we talking here?"

"I would say... Hebridean Blacks? The description's right, and there was an island involved too."

"Brilliant." He settled down again. Neville startled a little as he moved in a bit so that he was snuggled up next to him. "Go on. You were at the bit that talks on the dozens of ways to annoy visitors in your own home?"

"It doesn't actually give examples, you know?"

"That's alright. I could write my own book there. Number One, if the visitor's Aunt Marge: Exist. Number Two: Breathe. Number Three: Twitch violently at random intervals. Number Four: Don't ever blink when looking at her...."

 


	2. Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Secrets Are Revealed And The Truth of It All Begins to Unravel...

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**One Week Later**

The Boy Who Lived (To Disillusion His Fanbase), Longbottom of Longbottom reflected from his hiding place in a conveniently Disillusioned corner of the back paddock fence, had what one Bill Weasley, crowned by his vast numbers of relatives as Weasley of Weasley, Lord High Numpty of the Red Sea, called an absolute fetish, not just for dragons, but for the Big Scary Ones of any non-human species. The ancient patriarch - 'ancient' was purely in the eye of the beholder, at a hundred and forty-six, the whip-thin, white-maned and gallantly scarred retired Master Curse-Breaker looked as young as, if not younger than, the seventy-seven-year-old Frankie, and rode his slick, sleek black and silver bathchair like a hopped-up and hover-spelled Roman chariot of old - encouraged and enabled his obsessions shamelessly. Hippogryphs were quite in vogue as a means of local transportation this season, the patriarch of the Weasley Clan had told them, and there were now several dozen there laying waste to the frazzled gophers.

"Maybe it'd go a bit better if they were to ask us our opinions on the matter?" Potter suggested. He was perched on the fence itself, working his way through a fresh pack of jerky and surveying the scene before him as a scrawny, hunched little dragon assessing a new treasure haul. "It _is_ our world after all, and since they've all gone and buggered things up so spectacularly, and don't seem to be able to come up with even half of a useful suggestion between them, maybe they'd be better off if they listened to people who aren't actually old enough to bugger anything."

"They didn't bugger them up on purpose, Potter." Neville leaned against the fence, one foot propped on the bottom railing and forearms crossed atop, inclining his head politely as yet another of the hippogryphs wandered by... It inclined its own head in return, and wandered off to sample a distressingly squeaky specimen hiding behind the fourth post down. "Alright, they did get the wrong universe; there’s definitely that much stupidity to smack them for, but as for the rest… It's not like they knew we had a prophecy that might’ve warned them to shuffle off and bollocks things up for someone else, did they?. Also? Can you ever tell _you_ don't go to church."

"How’s that?”

"Because that's not the kind of line that commands respect and attention from habitually religious people."

"Maybe not British religious people. I don't know any Portuguese or Spanish ones personally, but I reckon there's a lot worse than that being expressed by the ones here now. They sound like they've got expressing themselves down to a way of life." Potter straightened a bit and craned his neck as, on the edge of the distant forest, a huge dark shadow emerged briefly, and immediately disappeared again. "Did you see that?"

"Not officially, no. Remember your letter from Big Harry? It's probably one of the Animagi from South America come in, and  whoever it is hasn't given us permission to look yet."

"Bit hard to miss,” he pointed out. "And they all stare at _us_ without our permission. I reckon it's only fair we're allowed to look back.” He craned his neck again, over his shoulder this time. “Isn't she here yet?"

"Who?'

"Astra. Wish she'd hurry it up, we can't get properly started till she's back from reviewing the details of the proxy Gate over the Ministry."

“It's bound to take some time if she wants to do it properly. Always a good idea that, yeah?"

Potter just grunted, and slid off the fence.

"Meet you inside," he said, and disappeared around the side of the Manor. Neville sighed, pushing himself up in turn... There were at least three hundred strangers inside the expanded banquet room of Longbottom Manor, all awaiting the arrival of Frankie and Stella's daughter,  Big Nev's only granddaughter, Astra Longbottom Malfoy (I.M Arithmancy), Head of the world-famous Arithmancy department at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and Manager-in-Chief of The Project (European Division). She was due to Apparate in at any minute, with her reviews on the current status of the Gate, though if she was dragging her feet on it in anticipation of what, or rather who, was waiting, Neville couldn't blame her one bit. After a week of constant exposure to the locals' version of the welcoming committee, he was beginning to understand just why, and even with the prospect of the peaceful After awaiting them, Big Nev and Big Harry had taken the opportunity to run as fast and far away from them all as they could... He eyed the side door with great disfavour as he approached. As he reached out to turn the handle, it slid open.

"Longbottom!" a familiar voice hailed. "Excellent timing. Astra just called; she's on her way now. Where's Potter got to?'

"He scarpered," Longbottom said gloomily. "His inherent sense of martyred hospitality is on the run again, and he's gone running after it."

Scorpius Malfoy laughed.

"He's probably just gone upstairs to restock on jerky," he said. "For the show. Come on, we've saved you your seat."

"Thank you," Neville responded, with absolute insincerity. Scorp grinned at him as he waved him through, casting a discreet Notice-Me-Not so that he could squirm through the crowds without being mauled. Neville liked Scorpius. He couldn't quite understand how the Malfoy line of any world had produced him, but he liked him. It was odd, though, Neville had thought upon first meeting him... He'd seen the portraits of the local Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy by now, and those of Scorpius' own parents, Draco and Astoria, and while he could certainly identify all of them in their primary descendant’s features...

"He looks just like Uncle Luke," he'd told Potter, puzzled. _"Just_ like him, even if he's old and Uncle Luke's not. I mean, he's not that tall, and Uncle Luke is six and a half feet in his battle boots and built like a really nice-looking, neat and tidy troll, but there's just something about them that's exactly the same. He looks more like him than he does any of his relatives here."

"Six and a half _feet?'"_ Potter blinked. "Really? Only... Really? Scorp said that his own grandfather Lucius was only about his height, though bigger across the shoulders and all. He's built like his dad Draco there, and his dad was built like his own mother. Your Auntie Niss’ counterpart."

"Mm. None of our world's Malfoys are tall at all, they all seem to be the same size as the ones here, but Gran says that Uncle Luke takes after his mum's mum's people, the Burgesses, that way. None of the men are under six feet, and there hasn't been a woman there in the last five generations who was under five ten. Oh, and he has blue eyes. He got those from his mum too, she says. They only turn grey like the rest of the Malfoy men's when he's dealing with idiots."

"Ah well. I don’t suppose it matters much. They all thought Big Harry and I matched physically, and we do in every way but one, but they couldn't really see that till I got here.'

"Huh?'

"You might not have noticed, but I'm really small," Potter explained. "The healers did scans and looked at photos of Big Harry when he was in first year at Hogwarts to compare, and they all said that we're proportionately identical, but I'm prolly at least six inches shorter and a stone lighter than he was at my age. They reckon that even though we do look exactly the same, I'm built like my mum was; she was really small too, and Big Harry got more of his dad's height. He wasn't tall, but he wasn't short either. But we still match in every other way."

"That could be a bit of a problem when we go back, yeah?" Neville said dubiously. "When we pop in at whatever point we do, and everybody in our families and at school notices you've suddenly shrunk half a foot? And if Big Harry goes in at the same size he was when he lived here, won't the Dursleys notice?'

"No," Potter said. "Al said he's prolly just going to put a Notice-Me-Not on himself while he's there so they don't pay any attention to him. And his cu... room too, so he can fix it up the way he likes, with extension spells and all, and aversion spells so they don't pay any attention to it. He'll be able to come and go as he likes, like he isn't even there, or rather, more like they aren't."

"What about school? Not just Hogwarts, but your primary?'

"He'll prolly fix it so they think he's still going there too," he said. "Can't see him wanting to sit through that again, much less deal with Dudders and his friends every day in the playground. Actually they reckon he might not stay on Privet Drive at all, just make it look and feel like he is again, to the blood wards there - he can get past those in his sleep - and go off and glamour himself as an adult, and live like he wants till he gets Sirius Black out, and Remus Lupin cured, and they come to pick him up from Privet Drive. As for after we get back... I dunno. They said they've written up several different ways it could go, and that Big Harry and Big Nev will let us in on the most appropriate one when we're all together, after Riddle's gone and before they do the ritual to bring back your parents."

"Is it just me," Longbottom said, once he'd digested that last bit. "Or do they all seem a bit sketchy on the exact details on how we're to manage things once they've done what they planned to do and left us to live happily ever after? Only, you know, the story doesn't end there, does it? For us? We're still have to deal with the results. It's good that they have faith in us and our ingenuity, I suppose, but still. We're going to be _fourteen._ At the _most._ At the beginning of _fourth year._ Pretty sure they don't teach you the magics on how to make entire populations ignore your established reality versus theirs till at least your OWL year."

"Al says that if I'm really short when I go back, shorter than I should be, Big Harry can just skive off for the afternoon and I can go back in his place saying that I had an unfortunately permanent accident with a shrinking potion," Potter said. "That coincidentally and strangely fixed my vision as well. They did that for me as soon as I got back. They had to, with the knocking about I got coming through."

"Uh?'

"I had a rougher trip than you did," he explained. "You just sicked up a bit with it, and only for the one evening. I was sicking up on and off for a week, and cracked my skull and a few ribs too, and had bruises all over me, and the crack might've been what did  in my balance, they reckon, and that's why I can't fly. It affected my vision too; there was a big bit of glass got in one eye from my glasses, so they actually had to do surgery there, _and_ pull out the phoenix tears."

"What?" Neville stared, aghast. "Are you _serious?_ They never told me that that could happen!"

Potter just shrugged. "I'm fine now," was all he said. "And they said the return trip'll be a lot easier, because it's all downhill."

"I would still liked to have known it was a _possibility!_ Why wouldn't Big Nev tell me it was? That's not right at all! I definitely would have told _him_ , if it had been the other way round!"

“No idea,” Potter said. He turned away toward the terrarium, reaching in again to scoop out Scuttle, but not before Neville caught a glimpse of… something… flicker across the thin little face - something not hard, exactly, but bitter yet, and deeply, deeply unhappy. His gut twisted uneasily.

“Potter,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Why was it Al who contacted you about the Project, and not Big Harry? When we were still at home?”

“I dunno.” Potter stroked Scuttle’s head with a finger. “Prolly because he didn’t want to go back before he absolutely had to? I wouldn’t’ve, it it were me.”

“Did you ever ask anyone?”

“I didn’t have to,” the other boy said shortly. “Would you look through a window offered you, that looked straight back into your own face as a baby while it was still That Night on the other side?”

“Maybe,” Neville said. “Yeah. If I had a chance to reach across and pull myself through so I wouldn’t have to see the rest of it.”

“And if you knew that you had to swap places? That it wouldn’t just be happening in your head anymore, but that you were going back into it? I reckon you’d put that off as long as you could, wouldn’t you, if there was someone else to do that bit, at least, for you?”

Neville said nothing more, just sat on the edge of the bed and watched him pet the rune spider. After a moment, Potter reached up to scratch his head. He watched as the thin little fingers pushed the thick black hair aside… Underneath, as the tousle was shifted, was a small white bald spot. From the angle, it looked slightly indented. The fingers rubbed it, and removed. The hair fell back, covering it again.

* * *

 

"So what did I miss?" Potter inquired, slipping onto the chair beside him. All around them were a series of long tables and chairs, and on the walls surrounding, and hovering over those tables, were revolving working models of the Gate and magically mounted whiteboards done up with runes, equations, sketches, arrows, question marks, and speculative captions. Too, every individual present now had a binder containing a copy of the relevant transcribed sections of his and Neville’s world’s version of 'The Tales of Beedle the Bard' in hand, and the tumult as the gathered crowd argued and debated the possible and likely interpretations of the contents was heated, to say the least. “Don’t suppose a miracle’s happened and they’ve made any actual  progress?”

"No." Neville tucked his feet up under his own chair. “They’re still stuck on Chapter One: In Which We All Comport Ourselves In A Completely Speculative, Rubbish Manner.” Potter sniggered, reached in his pocket and retrieved a Mars bar, peeling it and breaking it in half, and handing the half over. They nibbled together. When they were finished, Neville reached in his trouser pocket, retrieved a piece of gum and unwrapped it. He pushed the wrapper over to Potter. Potter pushed the chocolate wrapper back.

"Twenty Questions: Longbottom Edition," Potter said, as everyone talked over and around them. "Number twelve: you haven't actually gone into the pool in the loo yet. Can't you swim?"

"No. Uncle Algie pushed  me off the pier in the pond behind our country house when I was...six? To see if I'd float, or save myself with magic. It was dead traumatic, and now I only take showers."

"Isn’t _that_ lovely. The bit with your Uncle Algie, I mean, not the bit with your showers. Was he planning on fishing you out before you actually drowned?"

"No idea. In the end it didn't matter. Gran rescued me. She saw the whole thing through the parlour window, levitated me out  and then Apparated over on the spot and hexed him so hard that he was in St Mungo's for a week. Right after she slapped him round the mouth so hard she broke his jaw."

That last was caught, predictably, both on the edge of a wandering _Sonorus_ and during a lull in the general conversation. A few feet away, Frankie turned to face them.

"Your Gran broke your Great-Uncle Algie's _jaw?"_ he repeated.

"Yes," Neville said, quite unperturbed by all of the focused attention after a solid week of peeling the pasted eyes of strangers  off of himself at every turn. Self-expression as per Potter's definition was one thing; but he, and Potter too, and all of the immediate family (Frankie and Stella in particular, and particularly in light of the incoming and patently badly-raised hordes) were quite enjoying his own preferred applied interpretation - that is, that as everyone coming through seemed to believe that he was Big Nev shrunk in the laundry, it was only polite to give them all exactly what they were expecting. His regular employment of his not-nine-year old vocabulary, therefore, and his unnaturally adult habits - some his, some drawn from his memories of his major role-models at home, and not a few of which he'd picked up from Big Nev himself during their discussions  - provided his immediate relations with any amount of amusement. On the purely pragmatic level, he was retaining a huge number of absolutely entertaining episodes and insights on human nature that would be invaluable in his anticipated career as a novelist. "It was brilliant. Didn't she do that here?"

"No," Frankie said. "No, I'm pretty sure Dad would have mentioned that at some point."

"D'you think she'll let me adopt her?" Potter inquired perkily. "As my Gran?"

"She might." Neville retrieved another piece of gum and unpeeled it, popping it into the smaller boy's mouth. Potter chomped loudly and obnoxiously, that emerald gleam lurking. Neville, in another recalled and atypically adult gesture, (appropriated from Auntie Niss this time), tched indulgently, and reached over and bumped his chin up and mouth closed. Down the table, Al sniggered in appreciation as he moved a red checker from the board set up between him and Scorpius.  Scorpius promptly pointed his wand at it; it burst into flame and fluttered down in a sad little heap of ashes. Al glared at him. Scorpius smiled sweetly and sipped his prune juice. Potter, in the meantime, doe-eyed at Neville again, batting his eyelashes in thanks for the gum as he tilted his little head and rested it on his shoulder... Any number of their oglers shifted uncomfortably at the sight.

Al's snigger returned as he watched them all squirm. Scorpius flirted his own eyelashes at _him._ The oglers who spotted them didn't look uncomfortable at all; they just looked annoyed. Al just poured his best friend more prune juice, offering it forth along with a large, coy wink. The underlying gleam was as shining and emerald as Potter's own... The two men’s public presentation as Daft and Doddery Little Old Men (complete with matching snake-themed canes, that traveling checkers set and thermos of prune juice) was all a big scam, Neville decided. Albus Severus Potter and Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy had never actually grown up at all; they'd simply stopped as teenagers, and let their bodies age on without them.  "If you say please. You can keep practicing on me in the meantime. Now, shh, or they'll go on drawing conclusions and making decisions without us, and bollocks it all up again. Not that I'm ungrateful, but how can you plan for thirty years and then get the wrong universe by accident?"

"An excellent question, " a pleasant, light feminine voice said from the doorway. "To which the answer is, you can't."

“Astra!" Potter waved, sitting up immediately.  “Over here!”

"Wotcher, Harry," Professor Astra Longbottom Malfoy returned.  Neville pushed back his chair, stood immediately and respectfully, strode across the room, and offered the deceptively soft-featured and smiling, blonde, blue-eyed woman his hand. She took it without a blink. He kissed it lightly, then turned it over.

"Longbottom of Longbottom at your service, Madam Malfoy," he said, and reaching over with perfect aplomb, removed a single orchid from the vase on the closest windowsill, shook it dry and offered it. "It's a pleasure and a privilege. Big Nev’s told me all about you."

"All good things, I hope?' she inquired as she removed her outer robe. He took it gallantly as he offered her his arm and led her to their table.

"Of course," he reassured her. "And that's not even accounting for the fact that you're his favourite granddaughter." He cocked his head and stepped back. Big Nev had warned him of course, so that he wouldn't be caught off guard, but still. _Still._ "Did he ever tell you that you look just like our mums?"

"Do I?” She twirled the orchid in her fingers. It shrank immediately, glassed over, and sprang a delicate gold chain. She slipped it over her head and tucked it inside her blouse.

"You do,' he said.  "It's nice to see the resemblance carried over here.” He held a chair out for her in approved Gentlemanly Style. "May I offer you tea? Big Nev told me you take it black with two sugars?'

"I do. And he did, did he? How did that come up?'

"We were talking about our families," Neville explained. "And realized that it's possible that after all this is done with you won't ever have a counterpart in my world, so I wanted to know everything about you. He said that the most important bit to remember, or at least the first thing, was that you're a Master Arithmancer, and that Arithmancers run on tea the way Warders and Aurors run on coffee. So  I asked him how you take yours. Actually, I asked him how everyone in the family takes theirs. Only it's the little details, don't you think, that are the most important? My godfather, Lucius Malfoy, taught me that one. He said that they make the world go 'round, along with consistently applied good manners and a strategically applied, situationally appropriate sense of humour. Those three things got him through ten years of snowing the Great Dark Git from here to bloody Alaska, he says, never mind saving a good third-to-half of the Magical population of Great Britain, _Gran_ says. Oh, and then there's St. Roux, of course. I was very glad to hear that their fashions carry over here too. We both agreed, Uncle Luke and I, I mean, that you just can't go wrong with St. Roux."

"I thought you two didn't know each other that well?" Potter asked. "Because it's not politically prudent?”

"We don't," Neville said. "And it wasn't - isn’t - but there were a couple of times when he arranged to meet with me after I sent him a private message through the house-elves because I had some questions I had that I wanted to ask him, and we fit a lot into the time we did have. History lessons, life lessons... Stuff he said a boy should know, that he could best learn from men. And he _is_ my godfather, so he said it was down to him."

"He wasn't worried about Riddle getting into your head later?'

"No. I asked him, and he said not to worry about it. He'd make sure if he went back in that he wouldn't bother with me there. It wasn't something he could do for Draco, he said, but he could do it for me."

"He sounds like he's a very intelligent man," Astra said as she settled herself. Chairs scraped everywhere as all of their occupants at the various tables turned them to face her. "You may give him my best regards when you see him next, and tell him, from me, that he raised you very well indeed. And I'd love some tea, thank you. You might want to make yourself a cup too, while you're at it. I imagine we'll both need it for this next bit."

"Mm? How's that?'

"Every universe has a lock on its door," she explained. "And the key we designed is not designed to fit any of the others. It can't; every lock, again, is as unique to that universe as any given soul. That being said, I've checked and triple-checked everything at Hogwarts and the Ministry, and everything looks exactly as it should as per the specs of the universe we selected in the first place. And that means...." She looked around. "That someone - or some _ones_ \-   _interfered. Intentionally."_

Potter frowned, sitting back, and, running first one hand through his thick black hair, then the other, leaned forward, hands still clutching his head and elbows rested on the table as he scowled in fierce concentration. Any number of people around him looked at each other as he did so, and back again. Neville had a distinct feeling that they were all intimately familiar with the particular series of gestures, and was not a little disconcerted - again- on how the vast majority of the crowd were now fixated, the individual starry-eyed gazes now collectively dialed to 'stupid' as they waited for him to speak. Across the table, Albus Potter's lips thinned in thunderous displeasure at the sight, and his chair scraped a bit, as if he were about to push it back and deliver his obviously blistering opinion there... Whatever the relationship had been between him and his father, it seemed to work in reverse with his youthful counterpart; his protective instincts were nothing short of frightening. Scorpius bumped him lightly with his elbow, though, before he could rise, leaning in to murmur something inaudibly. The scowl didn't fade noticeably, but the chair silenced.  
  
"You're saying that someone pulled a bait-and-switch?"  Potter said finally, sitting up. "And made you all think that you were working with one universe, but slipped another one in the viewer so that you all thought you were seeing one thing, but you weren't?"

“O-plus for you.” Astra smiled approvingly. "And well _done,_ you!"

"That's not possible," the nine-year-old boy before her pronounced flatly. "I've gone over all of the equations that all of you worked with on the arithmantic level, and there would have been thousands and thousands of variables that would have need adjusting at different temporal points over all thirty years of the Project in order to account for the evolving shape of the wards that would accommodate for the differences between the worlds. Never mind the extra power involved in fueling the extra elasticity of the Gate itself, and in hiding what was going on with all of it there for thirty years. The only way someone could pull all that over without anybody noticing what they were doing was if they'd built a kind of free-standing generator containing all that extra needed power, and set the parameters for the external and auto-running contingency vectors that would needed to accommodate for those shifting variables before you ever got  properly started with any of it."

The adoring, fatuous looks faded, replaced by mass murmuring confusion. Frankie's lips quirked at Stella behind his tea mug.

"You've gone over all the _equations?"_ James Potter, Big Harry's elder son, repeated, puzzled. He was much taller than his brother Albus, with a receding hairline,  brown eyes, a long, wrinkled, mobile face, and incredibly, incredibly shaggy, waggly eyebrows. Neville liked him well enough, though not as much as he liked Al. The best word to describe James, he thought, was 'artless' - everything he felt showed just as soon as he felt it. Hearts, Neville thought, were all very well, but they functioned by far the most effectively (and safely) when stowed safely and firmly under the shirt where they belonged, not worn on the sleeve of one's robes. "On the _arithmantic_ level? And you understood them? How? Dad wasn't an Arithmancer; nowhere near the level that was required anyway. That's why he farmed out the job to Astra in the first place."

"Say it with me now," Potter said sardonically. "All of you. Again. _I'm. Not. Your. Dad._ Well?"

"Your proposed scenario,” Astra said. "Professor Potter, is spot on. It is, in fact, the only - and I do mean only - possible explanation. That being said, and keeping in mind that, without all the very, very pertinent details there I just might get a calculation or two wrong should it become necessary to revise any of the original equations to accommodate for the extrapolated differentials in a key that, due to those still quite intact glamours, is _not_ sitting right in front of me... Would anyone here have any theories they'd like to share on possible means and motives? Not just in the interests of preserving Longbottom and Potter's world, but our world too... And, quite possibly, all the rest of them?"

* * *

  
  
"Erhm," one especially elderly woman in Quidditch trainers, blue joggers and a Holyhead Harpies t-shirt said. " _All_ of the rest of them? Only... Really? _All_ of the rest of them? As in..."

"The entire multiverse. Yes, really," Astra Malfoy said. "The smallest details make all of the difference, Mrs Potter. In everything. Everywhere. _How_ many times did we all go over this again? _Things. Affect. Other. Things. All_ of the other things, and when you're working with, and manipulating, one  of the defined and universal pivot points of the interdimensional mainframe  - that would be the Room of Requirement again - and bugger anything up in even the smallest way again, those affected things can _cascade."_

 _"Bugger,"_ the old woman said, and buried her face in her hands.  Her sons and daughter physically turned to stare at her.

"Mum," James said. "What did you do?"

"It wasn't just me!" Gin Potter said defensively to her eldest son. "It was me, and Hannah and Lav, and Hermione and Susan, and. Erhm. The Horntails."

"The Horntails," Astra repeated. Potter stopped chewing abruptly and sat up straight as if he'd been yanked.

"Horntails? _Hungarian_ Horntails? Are you saying that there are _dragons_ involved in all this?"

"I'm afraid so." Gin banged her forehead gently on the table. "Bugger. Bugger, bugger, _bugger."_

"It's alright, Gin," Bill Weasley said as he wheeled his bathchair over and beside her.  "It was my idea, Astra. If you're going to blame it all on anyone, blame it on m..." He blinked as he caught the Look directed at him from across the tables.  "Wow," he said to Neville. "And doesn't that bring it all back. You have _no_ idea how much you look like your Gran right now."

"Weasley,"  Longbottom of Longbottom said grimly. His young voice and every word projected clearly and precisely throughout the room. "Let me make one thing clear.  If my world ends because of your actions... If I can't return to that world, whether it survives or not... No matter how good your intentions, you're all going to be stuck with me. With me _and_ Potter. _Together._  And Potter and I are _nine years old_ . Big Nev and Big Harry were one hundred thirty six when they Crossed Over. That's a hundred twenty seven years, minimum, left to both of us in which make you all aware of just how very actively displeased with that course of events we would be. Now. Start at the beginning, why don't you, and continue on till you get to the end. Then stop. After that... After that..." He looked around, standing now, and small plump hands flat on the table.  His voice didn't ring like Lucius Malfoy's; it cracked and snapped like a vicious whip. "We will _fix_ this. We will  Get this Thing _Done,_ do you all understand me?  WE. WILL. GET. THIS. THING. _DONE!"_

 _"Blimey,_ I'm glad we're on his side," Al muttered to Scorpius into the dead silence that followed _that._ Bill Weasley just straightened in his chair and squared his thin, strong shoulders.

"Alright," he said. "Alright. Maybe it's for the best after all. Because when it comes out, now everyone will understand who he really was. And they'll understand who they are, and what they did to him." His eyes fell on Potter. "I don't know how much you and Big Harry had or have in common, Potter, really, so we're not defining you, I promise. This isn't about you. This is about us. All of us, and what our world did to Harry Potter, and the price he paid for it, that we demanded of him, not for the Greater Good, but for our Greater Good. Whatever you may think of us at the end... Remember this. Those of us who were involved were trying to set things right. All around. Because we owed him. And because we loved him. Love him," he corrected.

Potter eyed him. Bill reached over and took his sister's hand.

"We loved him," Bill Weasley said. "But there was someone else who loved him too, once. And they never got their chance together. Only sometimes... The heroes don't get to share everyone else's happy endings, do they?  Sometimes... Everyone else keeps writing their story for them, and they feel obliged to live them out because one happy ending for a world is never the end of the story, is it? The story goes on. Things keep happening. The Dark Wankers always come back. So every time the heroes think they're done... That they can retire... It all starts over again. And they're the ones the world assigns to take care of things, again and again and again. Because it's the hero's job. And what the hero wants, or needs, and sometimes, what he _is_ ... Gets lost. And so the hero lives his entire life on someone else's script. And that... That's just not right. It's not the way things should be. And when you get a chance to try to fix those things... You do. Because that's what you should do, when you're given the chance, not just to fix things, but to facilitate a miracle...


	3. Redux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A (necessary!) flashback that takes place on Little Nev's original world...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vocab/Slang/Nomaji Cultural References
> 
> Shufti - a quick look about  
> Napoleon and Illya - The Man from U.N.C.L.E  
> Various references to/from 'The Princess Bride'  
> Tom Waits: ‘Eggs and Sausage’, Nighthawk at the Diner (ref. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD0PTjPlc2g )

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**Lancashire, England**

**January 8th, 1990**

 

On a grey and rainy early midwinter morning, just after breakfast and only one short month before Big Nev Longbottom made his first appearance in his nine-year-old counterpart's portrait of his parents, that counterpart, having beat a hasty retreat to the attic and his father's vast collection of science fiction and fantasy novels before Gran could provide him with Productive Alternatives, made a discovery that would change the course of human events forever.

At the very bottom of the last of the ten trunks that held said collection, beneath the ungracious heaps of Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Asprin, Adams, Tolkien, McDonald, Lewis, Lovecraft, Shelley, Stoker and Carroll, was a green plastic bag containing two thick, glossy paperbacks: spines uncreased, covers untorn, and nary a bent corner to be seen. Their condition alone, never mind the content, would have been enough to attract young Neville's attention, for Frank Longbottom had been almost as rough on his books as he'd been on his colleagues during the war, and the obvious correlative there was that he'd never actually read the volumes in question. Intrigued, the man's son and heir plunked himself down on the floorboards of the attic and examined his find.

"Norton's Anthology of Contemporary and Modern Poetry," he read aloud. "A Collection in Two Volumes."

Neville had never been particularly enthralled with poetry, even in the abstract, but the inscription on the first flyleaf did catch his eye, and he traced it with his finger as he read it over several times.

 

**_Napoleon-_ **

**_As per our last conversation - music may have charms that soothe the savage breast/beast, but an apt, properly timed and well-rendered quoted verse will get you off the sofa every time._ **

**_And before you ask…  No. Themed limericks do not count, you great git._ **

**_Best wishes,_ **

**_Illya_ **

 

Neville had no idea who Napoleon and Illya were, but he recognized the handwriting immediately. The elegant, precise script was identical to that in the Muggle birthday card that he'd found between the pages of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'  the year previous - the card that had prompted him to ask Gran just why Lucius Malfoy, rumoured right-hand man of the unofficial spouse of She-Who-Would-Ever-Be-Known-As-Longbottom's-Bane, had been palling it up with his father during the worst of the war.

He settled himself, and began to turn pages.

Two hours later, the _de facto_ Head of House Longbottom turned back to the first flyleaf. Bright, sharp shards and fragments of lines and verses shuffled about in his head; mostly incomprehensible at his age, but no less intoxicating for all that... He put the books carefully back in the green plastic bag and pushed himself to his feet. He closed the trunk, and made his way downstairs, peeking around the corner before hurrying  to his room and closing the door firmly. He tucked the bag under his pillow, and dropped on his belly, reaching under the bed itself and fishing about for his left Sunday shoe. Stuffed into the toe was a carefully and tightly folded square of newsprint… Scrambling back up onto the bed, he unfolded it, smoothing it meticulously flat as he read the headline again, and the quite extraordinarily detailed story-slash-related-history  beneath, dated eight days before.

 

**ACCUSED MASS MURDERER, SUSPECTED DEATH EATER AND ACTUAL (LY NOT A) WAR CRIMINAL SIRIUS BLACK EXONERATED ON ALL CHARGES: ADMITS ONLY TO THE CRIME OF ILLEGAL ANIMAGERY AND IS SENTENCED TO FIVE YEARS TIME SERVED**

**INDUBITABLE (AND LIKEWISE UNREGISTERED!) RAT  PETER PETTIGREW OFFICIALLY ASSIGNED TO BLACK’S EQUIVALENT FORMER GRIM FATE IN THE MINISTRY-APPROVED DOG-HOUSE**

 

Neville  had no need to read the physical article again, of course - the words there  were emblazoned in his brain as clearly and deeply as was every other word of every other book or newspaper he’d ever read - but the action itself was soothing, and good practice for when he would start school besides. His teachers were certain to cotton on to his secret there sooner rather than later if he didn’t learn to present his preferred public persona on not just the instinctive, but autonomic level by the time he caught his first train out, and _that_ (considering what could be conceivably be at stake if some curious and intrigued Mind Healer-slash-Ministry-Approved Unspeakable  became inclined to go poking about to see what else was there besides the perfect memory), he was most certainly, _certainly_ not willing to risk.

It wasn’t lying, the nine-year-old boy reasoned as he bent his head over those paragraphs of particular interest yet again. It just wasn’t telling everyone everything that was there. No, that didn’t - couldn’t - count as a lie at all, and he was really quite certain that no one else would actually want to see what he had to be going on with along those lines anyway.  As they could only thoroughly regret their own intrusion once they took a good shufti, it was only kind to protect them from their own untoward curiosity in advance.

Neville refolded the paper, tucked it into the bag of books snugged under his pillow and weighed his options.  After a moment he set his small round jaw firmly and abruptly, and before he could change his mind, swung his legs over the side of the bed and crossed the room,  rummaging at his desk for parchment, quill and no-blot, insta-drying ink... Fifteen painstaking and laborious minutes later, he folded the parchment tightly into a small square, and glanced around again.

"Dolly!" he called. Dolly popped in immediately, opening her mouth to respond, and sighed instead as she processed the vision before her... Neville stood patiently as she spelled him clean of random smudges and strands of cobwebs (she had no idea how he had managed to attract those; as she supervised the  cleaning of the Manor herself, attic and cellars included, there was certainly nothing of the like about to be going on with), and starched him from top to toe. When she was finished…

"So. What can Dolly be doing for Master Neville?"

Neville held out the folded parchment.

"I'd like you to take this to Lucius Malfoy, please," he directed. "Right to him, no stops or passing it off to anybody else. Don't tell anybody. At all. It's private man-to- _man_ stuff, so it isn't anybody else's business, not even Gran's."

"And shall Dolly be waiting for a reply?" she inquired. It was, to her credit, completely devoid of open condescension and amusement.

"Yes, please." Neville kissed her cheek. "Thanks, Dolly. You're the best." The house-elf just patted his own cheek fondly and popped out, cracking into the huge, immaculate kitchens of Malfoy Manor.

One quick murmured inquiry later and Longbottom's Head House-Elf popped out again, reappearing in front of a plain, unadorned door in the basement level of the west wing. She rapped smartly. The vigorous, vaguely melodic singing from within paused abruptly, leaving only the sound of distant, swampy burbling and, strangely enough, the distinctive sharp crack of sun-warmed ice.

"Yes?” a deep pleasant voice called.

"It is being Dolly, Master Lucius," she called back. There was a pause, footsteps, and the door opened, offering up a blast of magically chilled air and a tall, smiling man clad in laceless trainers, black Muggle jeans and turtleneck, and a long canvas apron. He had a bright blue and orange bandanna tied securely over his pinned blond hair, and smelled overwhelmingly of raspberries.

"Dolly!" he hailed. "How are you? Come in, come in!"

"Thank you, Master Lucius," she obliged, and ducked into the sanctum of sanctums: the Lord of the Manor's personal potions lab. When the door had closed behind her, she held out the folded parchment. Lucius eyed her quizzically, but stripped off his magically thinned dragon-hide gloves, took it, and perused the carefully inked, straggling printed letters within.

 

**_Mr. Lucius Malfoy_ **

**_Malfoy Mannor, Wiltshur, England_ **

**_Janury 8, 1990_ **

 

**_Dear Uncle Luke._ **

**_I know were not suposed to talk anymore but would it be posibal for you to come see me in my room toniht after Gran and Uncle Algy are in bed. I would like to talk with you on some persinal things that are nobudy elses bisnis. If you can come, please do not tell anybudy, not even Auntie Nis or your house-elves._ **

**_Respectfully yrs,_ **

 

**_Neville Frank Longbottom._ **

**_(Longbottom Mannor, Lancashur, England)_ **

 

Lucius turned the parchment over and back. Dolly waited patiently, little hands folded behind her back as her former master popped a wand from under his right sleeve and transfigured the tip to that of a Nomaj biro. He Vanished the original message from the  parchment (magically unwrinkling it in the process), and scribed swiftly.

"Return to sender," he directed, holding out the rolled scroll. "No stops. If anyone is with him, slip it under his pillow and inform him once you catch him alone that it is waiting."

"Yes, Master Lucius," Dolly said obediently as she nodded to the tall (relatively speaking) young house-elf perched on a tall stool opposite, now dicing a smoking purple root briskly and humming along to the muted charmed crystal set back in a neat corner of his work station... He too wore a canvas apron, along with little dragon-hide gloves, safety boots and, in lieu of a bandanna, a bright blue knitted wool cap designed to accommodate his ears and  topped with a screamingly orange floofy bobble charmed into the shape of a tiger lily. He looked supremely unperturbed by what most house-elves would consider the standard implications of his attire... Dolly herself was quite accustomed to the particular and peculiar vision, but only to the point… She blinked, and offered him a double-take.

"Dolly may be going blind in her old age," she said. "But is that an _earring_ Vinny is wearing?'

"It is." Vinny sent the diced root from the cutting board into the potion of the day, simmering away in a series of tiny, fist-sized frosted-over cauldrons set over magically cold flames. Whatever was within the cauldrons glurped loudly and let out with a raucous, extended chorus of burps. "It is being Vinny’s Christmas present from Master Lucius, after Master Lucius is taking Vinny to see a Muggle film weekend before last. It is being a very good film, 'The Princess Bride', and Vinny is very much admiring the look as demonstrated by the Man in Black, a.k.a the Dread Pirate Roberts, if not his taste in women. Buttercup is being very pretty for a human girl, Vinny supposes, and Vinny is certainly understanding the attraction of perfect breasts in any species, but she is not being very bright, and that is at the top of Vinny's prerequisites list for any prospective life partner." He began to peel a second root carefully.

"Dolly is being very glad to hear it. Bindy is being very proud of her son's priorities there, Dolly is sure. And what is Dobby thinking of it all?'

The young house-elf rolled his eyes most expressively at that. As respectful, charming and properly raised as he was, the chronic ongoing feud between freed father and determinedly traditional son  was nevertheless the stuff of legends in house-elf society all across Great Britain... Neither elf ever let their polarized opinions affect their work, of course; that would have been unprofessional, but the subtle, pleasant, mutual and chronic snide was epic. Dobby's wife, Vinny's mother Bindy, prudently stayed out of things there, facilitated as she was by her duties as Malfoy Industries' primary international below-stairs liaison. She traveled a great deal for her master, all over the world, and employed the fact ruthlessly in her wise and categorical refusal to get involved. Respected and revered as she was for her status and competence, and the whispered and unconfirmed particulars around Dobby's freed status considered, all of their fellows felt perfectly justified in following her neutral example, never mind sitting back and enjoying the ongoing show.

As for Vinny...

Vinny's relationship with Lucius Malfoy was, too, the stuff of legends. Master Lucius treated all of his elves as the people they were, with absolute punctilious care, concern and amiable respect, but Vinny...

Master Lucius and Mistress Narcissa had been forced by circumstances to wait seven full years after their marriage to conceive their heir. That didn't mean that Lucius was inclined to wait on an effective son, and from Vinny's first days, he'd taken an intense interest in his personal elf, Dobby's, firstborn and own heir. Dobby and Bindy for whatever their own reasons, had encouraged the relationship, so far in nature beyond the traditional interaction between elf and human to be literally unprecedented, even offering their young master the privilege of naming him. _That_ little gesture had just about broken the house-elf network when word got out amongst the clans. Names were truly the only thing that house-elf parents, anywhere, had to offer their children as a gift, born as they all were by law and nature into absolute and perpetual servitude, and the ceremonies surrounding their bestowing were  profound to say the least. For Dobby and Bindy to offer the privilege... It was as good as saying that they considered Lucius Malfoy a house-elf in human clothing. No human, not _one,_ not in all of the history of house-elves, had ever been granted that honour before - that honour that stated that the not-yet-twenty year old human boy, in the opinion of those bestowing the honour and no matter the shape of him, had been born with, not just the ability, but the inclination, to offer up everything of himself to serve others, not just well, but perfectly.

  
Master Lucius, of course, could have no idea of the enormity of the compliment he'd been offered, simply because his own species, as was the case with very nearly every other race on the planet, had never processed that house-elves were not actually ashamed of their own nature. Quite the contrary; they  understood and took absolute pride in their ordained place in the universe - that is, as the facilitators that made it run smoothly, on however large or small a scale.  That small scale was especially crucial, for that was where the really important action inevitably occurred...  Any being, after all, could point and order and instruct. To be able to do, though - to do effectively, and as creatively as was necessary from within the context of one's designated tiny corner of the world, particularly when one was working around the clumsily worded, contradictory and occasionally outright evil order, all in order to maximize the chances of the if-only-eventual resulting betterment of all...

 _That_ was a challenge worth an entire species' lifetime of dedicated and absolute effort.

"That is being a rhetorical question, right?" Vinny was saying. "There is a distinct difference, Vinny is telling him, between clothes and accessories; they is more than obviously completely different categories beyond the one being forbidden and one not being forbidden, but.." He lifted a little shoulder in a classic 'parents: what can you do' gesture. Dolly patted his back.

"You is being a good boy," she said. "And yes, Dobby is being a bit much sometimes, but what can you do. There is being one in every family."

"So Vinny is told," Vinny said. "Ah well." He popped in a chunk of diced root... Thin streams of flames promptly shot out of his ears, diverting neatly away from the wool of the cap. Dolly winced.

"If Dolly may be making a recommendation," she said delicately. "May Dolly suggest that Vinny not be doing that in front of Dobby? The earring is fine in and of itself, and the flame is fine in and of itself, but together... And there is the bobble besides. It would not exactly. Mmm... Discourage that line of thought, would it?"

Behind them, from Lucius' workstation, there was a definite snigger...  Dolly just patted Vinny's back again, popping out to the renewed joint refrain of man and house-elf harmonizing on the sleek jazz riff now emanating from the  re-cranked crystal.

 

**Nighthawks at the diner-**

**Emma's Forty-Niner,**

**There's a rendezvous of strangers**

**Around the coffee urn tonight...**

**All the gypsy hacks and the insomniacs,**

**Now the paper's been read,**

**Now the waitress said...**

 

**'Eggs and sausage and a side of toast,**

**Coffee and a roll, hash browns over easy...**

**Chili in a bowl with burgers and fries**

**What kind of pie...'**

 

She popped back in again, directly to the young Master Longbottom’s bedroom. Neville was still there, seated cross-legged on his bed now and poring over the books of poetry again.

"Dolly has returned," the house-elf announced.  Neville unrolled the offered parchment and scanned the contents.

 

**_I would be delighted. I will plead a necessarily private overnight session in my potions lab, and shall be by at eleven or so._ **

**_Regards,_ **

**_L.M._ **

 

“Is everything being alright, Master Neville?” Dolly inquired, noting with some concern the suddenly frozen expression on the young master’s face.

“Erhm,” Neville said. “Yes. Yes, everything’s fine. Nrgh.” He quelled his rising panic. He, of _all_ people, had never required any extended lessons on the subject of actions and consequences, but his experience with the practical implications ‘of ‘be careful what you ask for, you just might get it’ was, at this point in his young life, another story altogether.  “Thank you, Dolly.”

“Mm. If Master Neville is saying so. Will Master Neville be requiring anything else of Dolly, then, or may Dolly be getting back to expressing her honour and joy at her selection as Longbottom’s Head House-Elf in the appropriately and  physically demonstrated manner?”

“No, no. I mean, go ahead. I’m fine. I don’t need anything else right now. Thank you.” He flopped back heavily as she cracked out.

“Nrgh,” he said aloud to the ceiling, as he lay there, only (he told himself firmly) slightly panicked. “No. Not nrgh. _Ack."_

 

* * *

 

At eleven p.m promptly, a soft knock sounded. Neville vaulted off his bed and scrambled to the door, opening it with a tug of both hands on the knob... A tall blond man, quite tall and broad-shouldered enough to fill the frame, stepped in, locking it behind himself and casting a neat silence spell. He smiled down at the small, round and fidgeting boy before him. It was a warm, brilliant and beautiful smile, and, aimed as it was, unequivocally and absolutely and only at him, it warmed Neville right through to his toes.

"Well met, Longbottom of Longbottom," his godfather said formally, and Neville Longbottom had to blink back tears at that, because he'd spent the last fourteen _hours_ fretting anxiously over the proper way to greet him so that the rest would go properly, and in the end, in the moment, somehow…

The man before him had _understood._

"Um," he said. "Hullo. I mean, well met." He gestured toward the bed, and the armchair he'd tugged over beside it. "Please. Make yourself comfortable."

"Thank you," Lucius Malfoy returned, and slung his plain dark green cloak off. Underneath it, he wore a pair of plain black Muggle jeans and a white t-shirt. Neville, opening his mouth to say something more, froze in his tracks, staring at the right forearm and the Dark Mark emblazoned there. Lucius sat on the edge of the chair, and waited, watching the round little face closely. Neville, caught in a memory of the last time he had seen that Mark, could say nothing: his face white as snow, his eyes black as the void with all the stars burnt out so that there was only the darkness behind and between.

"It's fact, Neville," his godfather said quietly. "Not truth. Do you understand the difference?'

"Yes," Neville said from a dark, breathless distance. "I understand. Intent."

"No," Lucius disagreed. "Intent doesn't have anything to do with it. Intent would mean that there was a point where I made a choice. Intent would mean that the other - the alternative - was, at one point, if even only the one point,  even once in my life, an option in my mind. It never was. It never has been. It never will be."

And the screaming in the back of Neville Longbottom's mind faded and stopped. He scrubbed at his eyes with his striped pajama sleeve. He turned and dug under his pillow, pulling out the green plastic bag, and the two accompanying books.

"I found these," he said. "In Dad's trunks. In the attic. It doesn't look like he ever opened them. They're from you, right?”

Lucius took the books and flipped to the flyleaf of the first. Neville watched as a tiny, wry and tired smile flicked through the blue eyes.

"Yes," he said. "And no. It does not seem as if he did."

"How does poetry get you off the sofa?" Neville asked abruptly. "What did you mean? Is it code? If he'd opened the book, and read it, would he maybe have... Would it have stopped what happened That Night?”

His godfather looked up at that.

"No," he said. "It would not have. It is - was - not a code. I was simply offering him advice on..."

He stopped.

"Yes?' Neville probed. "On what?'

"On how to manage women." The lips tilted. Neville blinked at him.

"You can _do_ that?” he said, and sat upright, eagerly, small round face alight. "Can you tell me how? Because Gran likes to manage me, and Dolly too, and sometimes I think it would be nice to know how to do it back. Not so they notice, but so that they don't. Notice, I mean. Not all the time," he added hastily. "Just once in a while. On _principle.”_

Lucius stared at him…. Then threw back his head and simply _howled_ with laughter. It went on and on and on, till the tears were running down his face and he was slumped and gasping in the armchair,  positively limp with mirth.

"My apologies." He struggled up, red-faced and sniggering. "That was _not_ what I was expecting you to say."

"I'm sorry," Neville said, abashed. "Only  I don't have a lot of people to give me advice, you know? I could ask Uncle Algie if I wanted advice on being stupid, but I don't. And I don't get out much, so I can't just watch people to see what they do, or how they do it, or what works and what doesn't. I just have Dad's books. And a lot of them don't even have women in them. Just boys and men. Which is fine in books, but that's not real life, is it? _"_

"No," his godfather agreed. "It is not." Neville squidged back against his pillows and rummaged under the quilt, pulling out his shoebox.

"Chocolate frog?” he offered.

"For dessert, perhaps." His guest reached into his expanded cloak pocket and pulled out a large fragrant paper bag. Neville's eyes nearly rolled back in his head.

"What is _that?”_

"Take-away.” Lucius conjured plates, silverware, napkins and linens, and transfigured the night table into a small dining table. "Curry, to be precise. Your father and I had our best and most productive discussions over similar meals."

"Oh." Neville scooted up, inhaling rapturously. "That smells _brilliant._ Hold up." He slid down and went into the washroom, emerging shortly. "Sorry. Had to wash my hands." He boosted himself back up again. "Mm. Thank you so much. This is just lovely."

"You are most welcome." Lucius eyed him curiously as he loaded up a plate for him with a bit of everything. The nine-year-old boy settled the linen napkin neatly on his lap and retrieved his knife and fork, tasting this and that with impeccable style and perfect manners. "The naan, at least, may be eaten with your fingers. It is especially nice when dipped in the vindaloo."

"Is it?" Neville examined his plate. "Are we talking situational etiquette or standard and generalized formalities?'

"I am sorry?'

"Is it alright to eat with my fingers because Gran and Auntie Niss aren't here to smack us for it, or is it the way they'd eat it too, because it's the accepted way it's done everywhere, regardless of company," he translated. Lucius lowered his own fork, astonished.

"The former," he said at last.

"Oh." Neville put down his fork and knife and, picking up a small piece of naan, dunked it and chewed - quietly, Lucius couldn't help but notice, and with his mouth closed. Neither skill, as he recalled, was one that the boy's father had ever mastered. "Mm." He dunked again, enthusiastically, but still tidily. "Thank you for telling me. I could ask Gran, but she doesn't really believe in situational etiquette."

"Context," his godfather said.

"Uh?'

"The word you are looking for is context -  that which allows you to modify, or justify, or at the very least, explain variations on those established and acceptable norms that are set out as the standards of society in order to maintain a baseline of acceptable and accepted behaviour."

Neville chewed thoughtfully as he mulled that over.

"It's a good word," he conceded. "I like it. So your getting that..." He nodded to the Dark Mark again. "Was about context?"

"It was, yes. And it remains so, and will continue to be."

"So you don't think he's really dead?"

There was a small silence.

"No," Lucius said. "No, Neville. He is not dead."

"What will you do if - when - he comes back?"

"What must be done," his godfather said. "Not because I wish to do it, but because it must be done, and I will be here, and when there is a job at hand and you are in a position to do it, it behooves a man, as your house motto says... to Get The Thing Done.'

"And who's going to help you there? Since Dad can't?'

"I do not know. It will be an entirely different war. We will have to wait and see.'

"No," Neville Frank Longbottom said, after a moment. "No, I don't believe we will.”

"Beg your pardon?”

"Sometimes you have to wait and see," the small boy said. "Sometimes you don't. This time, you don't. If you have to go back in because there's nobody else... You won’t have to find somebody else. You won’t have to find somebody else, because you’ve already got your somebody else. And that somebody else is me.”

 

* * *

Lucius Malfoy honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

"Neville..."

 _"No,"_ the boy before him said. His round little face was hard and unchildlike. "No 'Neville.' It's Longbottom. Dad was Longbottom. Now I am. And Longbottom and Malfoy... We go together. We did then, and we will again, if it's needed, to Get the Thing Done."

And Lucius Malfoy could do nothing, could _say_ nothing to that… Under the particular circumstances, there could be nothing, he thought, that he could say that would not serve as rejection of all he himself had ever honoured and held dear.  He could only gaze in wonder at the fierce and passionate, purely _indomitable_ little face before him.  _  
_

"You do not know," he said quietly. "You cannot know, Master Longbottom... What you are suggesting."

"Did _you_ know? When you went in the first time?'

Lucius closed his eyes.

 _Nine. He is_ nine.

_St. Michael the Archangel, defender in battle. What beautiful warriors you send us, in our hour of need._

_I will not -_ cannot _\- survive the coming battle. Just…  Give me the time to teach him what he will need to know, not just to survive it himself, but to_ live.

"Your mum died,” Neville said stubbornly, in the face of his silent guest’s apparent reluctance. "I read about it. My mum and my dad are still here. But they're dead too. I don't know if I can stop it from happening to anybody else's mum and dad, but I can't _not_ be part of the side that tries. And he won't expect me, will he? Nobody will expect me. I stutter, and trip over things, and have Uncle Algie's stupid down when I need it... I just need to keep on with it, so no one will ever think I'm anything else. And you can teach me lots of things. You can teach me how it's all done. And you can teach me about being an Animagus. That will help too."

"How could I possibly teach you how to be an Animagus?”

"Fairly easily, I expect. You’re one yourself after all, aren’t you?”

“Am I really?" His capacity for surprise was quite simply dead now, Lucius reflected. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. "And when did that happen again?”

“While you were away on your ISEP year,  probably,” his godson said matter-of-factly, and austerely,  at the politely bemused Look - “Don’t even try _that_ one on. I _know._ I only suspected before now, but you proved it tonight when you didn't apparate in. I know you didn’t, because you're not sicking up, and you told me the first time you came over that you do, every single time.  And you didn't floo in, because Gran's down her parlour, and that's where the floo grate is, and you didn't have one of your elves bring you in either, because that would have meant telling one of them, and I asked you not to tell anybody specially. All that means you got in another way, and You Know Who -"

"Riddle," Lucius said gently. "His name is Riddle, Master Longbottom. Names are power to someone like him; they hold a certain significance that they do not for men such as we, and in relinquishing his original... He thought that he was providing himself with a weapon to use against others. All he did, though, in his pride and arrogance, was make of himself a shadow and a lie, and we do not honour shadows and lies, do we? Not when we have the option of dealing truth over fact."

It took a moment for Neville to sort through that statement, but in the end he just nodded. "Alright. Anyway, as I was saying. Riddle would never would have expected you to be an Animagus, would he, because _he_ wasn't one, and he's not the type who likes to think that people can do things that he can't. Every book that Dad has says that. That the villains don't like to think about people having power that they don't, specially if they're working under them, and if they find out they do, they kill them so they don't get ideas on being better than their boss. And you're not dead, which means _your_ boss never found out. You don't have to tell me what you are," he added. "That's not good information to give me, in case I was captured, but you can still teach me how to do it, when I'm old enough, and it would be okay if you knew what I was, because you're a natural Occlumens and nobody could get the information out of your head."

"I'm... _What?”_ Lucius nearly choked on his curry as his capacity for surprise revived itself cheerily.

"A natural Occlumens. Auntie Niss said that she can keep a few memories of me in her head, but not lots," Neville explained. "In case he comes back, and goes looking. You worked for him for ten years. He would have looked every day probably, on you, because you organized everything for him, and you said last time you were here that Bellatrix Lestrange hated you besides, and was always trying to convince him you were a spy. And if you went ten years without him seeing anything, that means he couldn't get in to see what was there. Which _means,_ you have something going on that he doesn't know about - an ability that keep people out. And I looked up what that might be, in a book that's in the house library, and it's called Occlumency, and mostly you have to learn how to do it, but sometimes - it's very rare, but sometimes it does happen - some people are born with walls in their heads that nobody else can get behind. That other people can't even see are there. And if you're an Animagus, and have that wall too.. Well. Only it would explain a lot, wouldn't it. It would explain... Everything."

Lucius  put down his knife and fork and sat back in the armchair, regarding the small, round tow-headed nine-year-old sitting before him. Neville just dipped his naan in his vindaloo and nibbled at him inquiringly.

"Did you know," Riddle’s former Dark General said finally. "Master Longbottom… I worked with your father for going on ten years. I have no hesitation, none, in saying that he had one of the most brilliant strategic minds I have ever imagined my life... And he never once picked up on either of those things?”

"Maybe he just never mentioned them," Neville suggested. "Because they're not really things that needed to be talked about or confirmed?"

"Mm. Now tell me why you actually believe that what you just said is a load of great bleeding bollocks.'

"He didn't take the books out of the bag," Neville obliged. "Or open them, even to break the spines. He just read the covers with that bit about poetry on the front, and dumped them in the trunk."

"And the significance of that would be..."

"That he didn't know enough to realize why you really gave him the books in the first place. Not just to manage women, but to manage people. Only, it's all right there in the introduction, isn't it? It says that really good poetry is a reflection, not just of the way the individual writer's mind works,  but of the universal human condition, and if he really was the best at strategy, he’d have known that knowledge the universal human condition would be required reading. Because the same things are important to everybody, but the needs manifest differently in each person, so you have to get a good idea of what you're seeing in everybody together before you can see the differences and understand people _as_ individuals. So those books - these books - would have provided him with essential context, for everything, all laid out right there.  Truth, not just facts, like you said about..." He nodded to the Dark Mark. "And they're Muggle books, so they would be an even better reference than Magical ones."

'Why would you think _that?"_

"Muggles don't have magic," he explained. "So they look deeper, to see more of the things that they can't do, but still know are out there. It said so in the introduction to the section on C.S. Lewis. He said 'If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.' Poetry's all about investigating experiences that this world can't satisfy. I could see that much. I could feel it, even if I couldn't understand most of the individual poems. I could understand the questions the poets were asking in their poems, though. Poems are all questions, really. Two books of them, right there, with all the questions that everybody asks, with examples of how different people phrase them in their own context. So..." He chewed meditatively, as his godfather gawped at him, not merely astounded now, but utterly _boggled._ "All _that_ means that if Dad never opened the books... He wasn't open to everything after all. He shut himself off from certain paths, that you do see. He was a great strategist, but not quite great enough to suspect that you could be an Animagus or a natural Occlumens. Which means he did a little too good a job at thinking like Riddle when it came right down to it, trying to feel _what_ he felt, but not enough of a good job on thinking _how_ or _why_ he thought that way.  Only that's a bit of an important distinction, isn't it? And Riddle might have been a monster at the end of it, but he didn't start that way. Nobody does. And the things that you start with... Those are the things that stick with you, no matter which direction you go in. The things that you remember. Underneath. So he wasn't human... But sometimes he'd still think like one. And that would be something really, really important to remember if you wanted to beat him. Because those are the things that he would hate the most about himself, and  that would make him most vulnerable."

"To be fair," Lucius said after a moment. "The ability to think in the manner that Riddle thought in his last decade is not as simple a manner as all that. It typically required a certain disposition, or a kind of experience that your father, raised as he was, and being the kind of man he was, never could have had."

"Mm," Neville said vaguely. "Maybe. Maybe it's different for me. Maybe I have it because I was there on the night they tortured my parents. I mean, I was only sixteen months old, but some things... They're bound to affect you a bit after, aren't they?''

The room was suddenly very quiet.

"Why am I here, Longbottom of Longbottom," Malfoy of Malfoy said softly. "And what is the personal business that you wished to discuss with me?"

"Were you and Auntie Niss the ones who caught them," Neville said. "The Lestranges and Barty Crouch Junior? And turned them in to the Aurors?'

"And where did you hear about _that?"_

"It was in the Prophet. Last week. There was a big article about  Sirius Black, after they caught Peter Pettigrew and released him from Azkaban. Gran threw it out before I could read it, but I went and looked, because she doesn't do that unless there's something she doesn't want me to read. And it brought some stuff up about Mum and Dad, and your trial, and how you got off, but it was never confirmed that you were innocent, just that they didn't have enough proof. And it said there was a rumour that you and Auntie Niss were the ones who caught them, and called the Aurors to come pick them up."

Lucius rubbed his temples.

"I see," he was all he said. All he could say.

 _"Was_ it you and Auntie Niss?” he probed.

"Yes," he said bluntly. "Yes, Neville. It was."

"Will you tell me what happened?"

"I do not suppose you would be willing to wait till you are of age?”

"No," Neville Longbottom said judiciously.  "No, I don't think so. I think I'd like to know now."

Lucius sighed soundlessly.  Frank’s mind for strategy, he reflected, Alice’s gift for the devastatingly and near-invariably fatal hard hit, and Augusta’s killingly polite demeanor, all enhanced to staggering proportions through the boy’s own inherent and  profound grasp of the power of poetic metaphor...

 _Oh, Tom. You_ really _should have known better. Never mind the vagaries of prophecy,  you sealed your own fate when you chose the one your pride showed you in the mirror, and ignored the one whose eternal family legacy revolves around the imperative of Getting the Thing Done…_

 

* * *

He refilled his water glass, and sipped grimly. Neville settled back, eyes fixed on him, almost... No, there was no almost about it... _Hungrily._

"After Riddle disappeared," Lucius said. "Crouch and the Lestranges were convinced that the Light had him, and was holding him captive. Everyone else assumed that he was dead. Stories started coming out, on those who had been key figures in the Order of the Phoenix. Security was no longer considered quite the absolute issue as it had been while he was still walking about. When the four of them realized that your father was the official strategic expert there, they theorized that if anyone would know where Riddle was, it would be he. So they waited, and at the opportune moment... Caught up with him and your mother. After they had left your house that night, Bellatrix made a call to the Aurors. She said that there was a situation at your home. That you needed your nappy changed, and your parents were not in a position to provide care. The Aurors came immediately, and found you, and them. She had disguised her voice, but the phrasing... There was only one person who would have phrased the call like that."

He sipped his water again.

"The public outcry," he continued. Neville listened raptly.  "The outrage... All of the horror, all of the fear, all of the post-war grief in Great Britain... Your parents' torture provided a focal point. The hunt was called, and it _was_ a hunt. Brutal, merciless... Not wanton or randomly destructive, but by the end of the week, there was nowhere in Europe that anyone known to be in Riddle's circle could hide. The four of them, the Lestranges and Crouch, managed it for a few days, but after the point, they needed a contact to provide them with supplies, and Bellatrix called in one of the family house-elves to oblige them.  As the oldest daughter, you see, she assumed that those elves would be loyal to her on the principles of primogeniture that should have legally and magically assigned her, after her own parents’ deaths, as Head of House Black. They were not loyal. She had had no children, after all, and more to the point, at that point, was officially assumed barren. That meant, by the rules of house-elf magic again, Black's direct line and future, and Headship was not down to  her at all, but to the one person who had actually produced a viable heir for the family... Narcissa.”

“What about her sister? Andromeda? She was older than her, and had her baby by then.” Neville wrinkled his nose as he mentally called up his memories of the relevant family genealogy. “And shouldn’t the line have gone through Walburga and Orion Black anyway? They were first cousins, and had more Black blood between  than Auntie Niss’s parents. Only her father Cygnus was one; her mum was a Rosier, and that would have made Sirius Black next in line, not Auntie Niss again, or Bellatrix in the first place.”

“You are correct, but it did not matter in either instance. Andromeda and Sirius had been disowned for some time, and Sirius’ only sibling, Regulus, was dead. The house-elves were, therefore,  under your Aunt Narcissa’s orders to come to us if any of them heard from Bellatrix,but without warning her beforehand. The one Bellatrix summoned did just that. He told us all where they were hiding. And we went in together, and caught them unawares, and gave them exactly what they had given your parents, not terribly worrying about their sanity past the point where they would be considered fit to stand trial, because believe you me, not one of them had anything to be going on with there to start with. After we were finished, we brought them back to full health and started all over again. Several times.”

"How did you do _that?"_ Neville looked utterly fascinated.”Bring them back to full health, I mean?”

"Phoenix tears."

"Where did you get phoenix tears?”

"From a phoenix."

"Oh." He digested that. "Are you sorry now?"

"Mm. No. I am afraid not. Your godmother and I agree that it was quite the most delightful date night we have ever had. We healed them one last time, obliviated them of the memory of our presence, and called in the Aurors anonymously to come retrieve them before returning home to bathe and dress for an extravagantly enjoyable night on the town."

"Was that when Auntie Niss got hexed?' he wanted to know. “With the Opprobrium curse?” Lucius actually lowered his glass at that, with a not-quite-not bang.

"I _am_ going to buy out the Prophet tomorrow," he said grimly again. "And fire that cow Skeeter. As a matter of fact... It was. It was, unfortunately, the one good shot Bellatrix  got off in the entire episode. She never liked me, and knew that Narcissa and I wanted many children, and was getting her last dig in."

"Well, _that_ was stupid of her." Neville scoffed. “Infertility’s one thing, but there's always Solace, and she should have known that, considering she was supposed to be part of Riddle's deal there.” He broke off a bit of papadum and crunched. “She should have just gone right for the AK if she only had the one good shot, and it would have done both things - made you infertile, and got rid of you. Only you can’t exactly have children if you’re dead, can you?”

"Mm.” Lucius just returned to his water.  Neville put down his papadum and slipped down and came around the table. Lucius looked at him, startled, as he hugged him. Hard. He turned and gathered him up, hugging him in turn. He felt very solid, Neville thought as he buried his face in the white-shirted shoulder, and smelled good too - like really nice cigars and peppermint.

"'Nk you," he said, muffled, into the shoulder. Lucius stroked his hair gently with long, cool fingers, and allowed him the dignity of sniffling himself out and wiping his face surreptitiously on the shirt again before he removed him back to the bed.

"I really do want to help you," Neville said as he resettled. "You'll just have to teach me what to do."

"I will," Lucius said. "And I truly hope you will never need the finer lessons, but most of the basics are things that you would need to know in any case."

"Like what?"

"Things every gentleman should know," he said. "That are typically taught him by his father."

"You mean, like the proper clothes to wear, and how to tie a tie without magic, and how to brew proper tea and choose the right wines, and the shaving and unwrinkling and starch charms and all?"

"All excellent examples, yes.”

"Why are they all so important?” Neville wanted to know. "I mean, I know why they are in and of themselves, but I'd like to know why they matter in this particular context."

"The more predictable people find you," Lucius explained. "The less they think about you. The less they think about you - not of you, but about you - the more you can get away with, and most of that comes down to the way you present yourself. If you are habitually and impeccably neat, tidy and well mannered, and only shop at certain stores, and obsess over really rather stupid things like pairing your port with the appropriate cheese, they might admire your social canniness, but they're not going to take you seriously when it comes right down to it. And you do not want them to take you seriously, do you, because it makes you a target."

"Does it work the other way 'round too? Can you get people to not take you seriously because you don't behave in a manner that they think you should? That meets the standards that they want to meet themselves?"

“It does. You do not really have that option, though. You are Longbottom, and Longbottom has a Reputation to maintain."

"So what should I be aiming for?"

His godfather looked him over thoughtfully.

"A great deal of that," he said finally. "Will depend on the personalities of those you will define in the future as your peers. The vast majority of the lessons that I could, and will, teach you then, will only prove relevant once you start Hogwarts. For now.... We will work on establishing your essential foundations, based on predictable and established patterns of behaviour that society would expect from a young man bred from your particular ancestors."

Neville squirmed a bit back on the bed and listened attentively. Lucius sat back, stretching out his long legs under the table, crossing them neatly at the ankles, and arranging his plates in a neat semi-circle before him. Neville watched as he settled his elbows on the arms of the chair, tented his fingers, and rested his chin on the tips as he shook his long hair out and back… Lucius caught his sudden grin, and raised an eyebrow at him.

"Yes?”

"You're going to want to watch that," his godson observed. "You're going to be working with lots of new people during the next war, not just the old ones, and if any of them do get it into their heads that you might be an Animagus, the plates would totally give you away.  The hair too."

“Whatever do you mean?”

Neville glanced around, and pointed up… Lucius followed his gaze. In the corner of the bedroom, by the bathroom door, a large brown spider sat in the precise center of its perfectly symmetrical, pale and silky web… Even from the distance, they both could see the two foremost legs folded neatly together. Lucius looked at it for a long moment, then down at his own arranged legs and arms, and the circle of food dishes before him, and held up a long, pale and silky strand of hair between his fingers.

 _"Bugger,"_ he said succinctly.

“Can I see?" Neville said eagerly. "Now that I know?'

Lucius couldn't help but laugh. He transfigured his fork into a magically lit Muggle torch and passed it over.

"Shine it on your palm," he directed. Neville obeyed. Seconds later, his eyes widened hugely. His godfather reappeared abruptly in the chair. "You are," he said. "Literally, Neville, the only person in the world besides Niss and Dobby who knows. If you do not think that you can keep this secret... Please tell me now. I do not want to obliviate you, but..."

"Nobody's going to hear about it from me," Neville said immediately. "Ever. I swear it, Uncle Luke. I swear it as Longbottom."

“I believe you. I may yet have no choice, though, if I deem it necessary for your own protection at any point in the future, do you understand?”

"Yes. I know you wouldn't do it unless you really did have to. Though..." He hesitated.

"Mm?"

"This is all just between us," the boy said tentatively. "Right? Whatever we say here tonight? You won't tell Gran or Auntie Niss or anybody?'

"Not unless your life is in danger and I believe that revealing the content would be the only way to save you, no."

"What if telling were the only way to save _you?”_

"I want you to remember something, Neville.” his godfather said. “Internalize it. It may very well save your life one day. Just because you cannot see something does not mean that it is not there - and, conversely - that which you see before you, is never all that there is. There is always, _always,_ more to any given situation than there appears.”

"So you showed me that you were a spider on purpose?" he asked. "By sitting like that? To see if I would get it?'

Lucius Malfoy's chuckle was deep and soft and mirthful.

"I am impressed," he said. "Master Longbottom."

"Thank you. Do you have any other rules? Straight up?'

"Yes. When in doubt, follow your gut... And when it leads you off the known map, and you are faced with unexpected dragons, do not - do _not_ , whatever you do - blink."

"Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not there," Neville repeated. "That which you see before you is never all that there is. Follow your gut, no matter where it takes you, and no matter what happens after that, don't blink."

"Wonderful," Lucius said. "And what are we wearing on our adventures again?'

"St. Roux," Neville said promptly. "Eternally classic and timelessly elegant, and even if the robes there cost three times as much as the other fashion houses, they can only be considered a gentleman's investment. You just can't go wrong there, Gran says, and they're the only dress robes I've ever worn that don't make me itch  besides. That's good. Scratching in public isn't polite any way you look at it, but especially not on occasions that call for formal wear. Also, never forget your pocket handkerchief. You might not need it, but then again, you might, and if you don't have it, where will you be?"

"Well _done,_ you!" his godfather congratulated him, and dished him up more vindaloo. Neville grinned at him, helped himself to another piece of naan, and dug in with relish.

 

 


	4. Repercussions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vocab/Nomaji Cultural References
> 
> Up the corner on a Dunkies' run - to go for donuts and coffee (Dunkies' = Dunkin' Donuts franchise in New England)
> 
> Chowdaheads - morons, idiots (Boston slang)
> 
> Neville's remembered quote on Tony is from Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' 
> 
> 'Halfway Down' - A.A. Milne ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_lrvDu02VA )

**Longbottom Manor**

**Lancashire, England**

**April 5, 2117**

In his later years, and no matter the frequency of his musings on the specifics of the immediate aftermath of Bill Weasley’s revelations, Neville ‘Ace’ Frank Longbottom was always a bit surprised that it had taken a full ten minutes for Potter to lose it.

The first three of those ten minutes had been taken up by Weasley’s admittedly quite touching opening speech. The next six consisted of his preliminary explanations-slash-rationalizations. The sixty seconds that followed _those_ proved just enough time for the closest American delegate to pick his jaw up off the floor and re-hinge it firmly, so that his really quite excruciatingly vulgar summation could emerge in all of its wincing glory.

“Lessee if I got this  - pardon the expression - straight,” he drawled. “Y’all went and decided that dicking around with the integrity of the entire multiverse was a valid and reasonable alternative to sitting down with the man at some point - any point - in his lifetime and saying ‘Potter ol' man, not to put too fine a point on it, but you might want to reflect on the fact that your proper handle should be ‘The Boy Who Lived To Bite Pillows’?”

It wasn’t that he couldn’t appreciate the essential _sentiment,_  Neville thought. The integrity of the multiverse _was_ the integrity of the multiverse, after all, and getting dragons involved, however intelligent and well-meaning they might be, was just plain stupid. Apocalyptically stupid, even. No, it was the nasty, crude, just plain _rude_ little snigger that accompanied the sentiment that did in his sympathies there. The sight of the sniggerer in question, on the other hand, flailing frantically as he was blasted flat on his back via the working end of a furious Gin Potter’s wand, a brutal black thunderstorm of bats forming not just from his bogies, but from the bodily fluids streaming forth from his every associated orifice...

Neville never got a chance to finish the particular mental sentence. It was a fairly safe bet that he was not alone there.  Barely had anyone around him drawn responsive breath before a black-haired, emerald-eyed screaming fury launched itself from its chair and landed squarely in the offender’s gut, triggering an explosive black-winged stream of chittering vomit before seizing his arm and sinking a full mouthful of sharp white teeth clear through the man’s robes, into the flesh beneath, and straight through to the bone.

“That’s the Boy Who Lived to Bite _Pillocks_ ,” Harry Potter snarled loudly as he rose to stand,  red-faced and bloody-mouthed, astride his thinly screaming victim. “Anyone _else_ want to try that one on? Cos I might not not be old enough to express myself with the functional wand, but that just means that I’m gonna have to bugger every single one of you who feels the need to express yourselves on the subject with both of my _fists.”_

“Really, Potter?” Neville said, though his exasperation there, truth be told and in the startled moment, was more automatic than not. “How is _that_ polite?”

“They can all say please with it,” Potter snapped at him. “I’ve got no objections.”

“Sounds a bit unhygienic to me,” Scorpius observed as he leaned over for a better view. “I’d be happy to loan you my cane for the cause if you’d prefer that, Harry. What about you, Albus?’

“Where your cane goeth, there goeth mine,” Al intoned, and to Potter -  “Once more unto the breach, say I, and God - good? - for England, Harry and St. George! Though we should probably leave his dragons out of it till we’ve got more detail there to be going on with. Also, _really,_ Mum? Why were Scorp and I not privy to this fantastical little episode-in-the-lives-of, mm?”

“It involved making Dad happy,” James said dourly. “If they’d brought you in, it would have all been doomed from the start. Also, there were time-turners involved. You both got cut off there, remember, when you were fourteen, and you never got your privileges back.”

The particular exchange was the last semi-civil example of its kind for quite some time. The profound and unfortunate display of ill manners, as one Antonio Silva several universes over might have described the hullabaloo that followed, was quite horrific enough, even in the initial stages, for Frankie to tap the table. The two house-elves that popped in didn’t even need directing; they simply took one swift look-and-listen around and seized a nine-year-old Alien Clone apiece with the obvious intent of escorting them to the more age-appropriate environment.

Or, at least they attempted to seize them.  One of the Norwegian delegates reached out automatically to catch Potter as he jerked back and stumbled. She shrieked loudly as Potter grabbed her hand in retaliation, his bloody teeth sinking home once again.

“HARRY! NO!” James Potter’s voice cracked out, sharp and crisp. Surprisingly, Potter eased off, backing away into Al’s comforting, protective arms as he shook uncontrollably and furiously.

“It’s okay, Harry,” he said, surprisingly gently for Al. The chronically snide, darkly self-amusing undertones were gone from his voice completely.  “You’re safe. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Shh, now. You just go with Ruby, alright, and Longbottom. We’ve all got a few things to sort out here, and don’t take this badly, alright, but…”

The entire Manor seemed suddenly and abruptly to quiver on its foundations. Longbottom grabbed the back of Frankie’s chair and looked about in alarm. He was not the only one.

“What…”

“Come,” the house-elf, Ruby ordered him in a no-nonsense tone that brooked absolutely no argument in any world. “You is not needing to hear or see what is coming next, young masters, and you is best off out of it.”

“What’s coming next?” Potter, still red-faced in his furious indignation and terror, his face and chin and shirt streaked with blood, couldn’t help but ask. Ruby pointed. Outside the huge glassed-over wall of the conference hall was....

 _“Bugger,”_ Bill Weasley mumbled, and braced himself. He was not the only one.

“Stiff upper lip now,” Scorpius encouraged him, and at his Look… “What? It’s bloody entertaining when you’re not on the receiving end. Just remember, no matter how pissed he is, Jesus does actually still love you.” He moved a checker. “Has anyone here ever actually been present at a bona-fide Hour of Reckoning before? It’s always been on _my_ bucket list; what about you, Albus?”

Al sniggered. Again, he was not the only one...  Neville gawped at the window, slack-jawed at the sight of the monstrous vision now slithering out of the wood and round the side of Manor.  It was a definitely a snake, but bigger than any snake in any photo or description that he had ever seen or read about.... It had to measure seventy feet from tip to tail, and looked thicker, at its mid-point, than Neville was tall. From his position, he could see that it was pitch black, with the sole exception of a white collar of scales encircling its nominal neck. Potter said nothing, just stared in rapt, round-eyed wonder.

“What,” he breathed, near-reverent yearning emanating from his every bedazzled pore. “Is _that?’_

“That,” Ruby informed him. “Is not being a ‘that’. That is being a ‘who’, and it is no one - _no one_ \- you is wanting to cross, believe you Ruby. Don’t you worry, Master Harry. He _will_ be sorting out all of this nasty rude business, make no mistake.”

Even as she spoke, the visible bits of the colossal snake shimmered a bit, or rather blurred out. The size considered, it took quite some time. No sooner had the last scale faded…

“Three… two...one…” Al murmured.

And the front door blasted violently open. “JESUS FUCKIN' _WEPT!”_   The incoming bellow was enough not just to make the foundations (never mind the gathered hordes) quiver, but the rafters shake. “What the fuck is _wrong_ with you people? Can’t I even go up the corner on a Dunkies' run without you chowdaheads whipping ‘em out to piss on each other as soon as my back’s turned? Never mind the fuckin’ racket, you can see the fuckin’ yellow steam rising all the way from the back treeline!”

* * *

Neville’s first impression of the individual fuming before them all was accompanied (as his impressions often were) by an automatically recalled quote from one of his father’s books - _the man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed_. It didn’t quite fit, mind,  he thought in the disorienting moment, for the man - he stood in, perhaps, at five foot ten: square-jawed and barrel-chested, with thick, burly arms, shoulders and legs - looked the epitome of perfectly merged hero _and_ villain. His skin, somehow both weathered and smooth, was the colour of lightly milked coffee, and his shoes, socks, slacks, short-sleeved button-down, and the low-riding black snakeskin belt and accompanying twin wand holsters were all as dark as Potter’s hair. The only exceptions to the ongoing theme was a round white clerical collar identical to the ones worn by the ministers back at St. Paul’s, and a small, glimmering gold cross on a similar chain emerging from underneath.

“No? Nobody?” The newcomer tched in disdain. His accent was broad, sprawling and absolutely, appallingly, alarmingly American - whatever ‘r’s weren’t displaced or missing entirely were not just flattened, but stomped. From where he sat, Neville could see that his eyes were as strikingly beautiful as Potter’s, though they were a darker green rather than emerald, and there were flecks of gold there too, as a forest or a jungle lit by shafts of sunlight slipping through the trees. “Here’s the deal, then. First to ‘fess up gets divine credit for retaining their balls at least, if not an actual gold medal or years off in Purgatory.  You can even try for the purely secular and scientific explanation if you really can’t stomach the thought of me as a representative of something bigger than your own egos.”

“Dragons,” Neville offered as he collected himself, since no one else present seemed inclined to accept the invitation. “Hitching the assisted ride across the multiverse in order to  facilitate their and their enablers’ personal agendas as per revisited life choices along the classic themes of True Love and High Adventure.”

“Halle-fuckin’-lujah! We have a live one! _In Nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti_ ; Jesus forgives you for whatever your deal was in this particular shitheap, have a nice jam donut to celebrate your uncommon moral prudence, and… Uh? Run that one by me again?”

“You’ve been harbouring a sleeper cell from the beginning of the Project.” Neville accepted the donut and the accompanying napkin offered him from the box extracted from the depths of the man’s black snakeskin satchel. “Thank you so much. The parties involved wanted to give Big Harry a second go at a happy ending with his wife’s dead brother, so they all went back in time before everything got started in order to a) pull a bait-and-switch with the universe you thought you’ve been dealing with from the beginning, but haven’t, and b) carve a Hungarian Horntail-shaped side-door leading around the Gate into the heart of the hopefully no-longer-quite-so-Lonely-Mountain. That way they could send a pair of them along to facilitate things.”

* * *

“You fuckin’ with me, kid?’ the man said suspiciously. “Because as a Catholic priest, I’m obliged to tell you that Jesus _will_ spank you for that, and before you say - again, any of you - that it’s an empty threat because you don’t personally believe in Him, I’ll remind you - and everyone else here, again - that that don’t make one single smidging shitbit of difference in terms of His actual state of existence. Or mine, for that matter. _In situ Christi_ , people. It’s a thing, and admonishment of sinners is a spiritual mercy besides. In case you didn’t get that, that means I get celestial bonus points every time I open a can of righteous holy whoopass on your sorry heathen selves.”

“I know what _in situ Christi_ means,” Neville said, swallowing a mouthful of donut. “Mm. This is just lovely. Thank you again. The Archbishop talked about it in his sermon when the Pope was visiting London last fall and he was explaining the differences between the rules of Anglicans and Catholics. And I don’t _mess_ with people.” The pointed verbal substitution was not subtle. “It’s impolite, and my Gran raised me to be a gentleman. Where are you from? I’ve never heard your accent before.”

Surprisingly, the priest laughed. “I’ll just bet she did,” he said. ‘If she was anything like Frankie’s there. I’m from South America, at least originally. My ma was born there. My pop was from Boston, though, in the States, and that’s where I grew up. I’ve traveled about a lot since, but no matter where I’ve gone or how long I’ve Iived there, the accent’s stuck.” He held out his hand. “Tony Silva, MSJ - the Magicals of the Society of Jesus.”

“What kind of snake are you?” Potter, finally snapped out of his dewy-eyed trance, demanded eagerly, shoveling himself between them and intercepting the offering. Neville cleared his throat pointedly. “Ah. Sorry.  I’m Harry Potter,” he said to the man. “There-are-none-before-you-and-none-after-you-who-can-replace-you-if-you-are-lost-I-will-not-forget-you-I-will-remember-you-always. Is it really rude to ask, now that I’ve actually seen the form? Only, Big Harry told me it wasn’t proper, but then you weren’t exactly hiding it, were you?”

“Aren’t you the shiny little button.” Tony Silva looked more amused than put off as they shook hands. “Pleased to meetcha, I’m sure. And no, it’s normally not considered polite; it’s a question of being shown deliberately, but you come on recommendation, never mind the culturally appropriate greeting, so we’ll just forget about it.” It came out _fuggedabowdit._ “I’m a titanoboa. One of a kind in every way there is; they’ve been extinct for oh… About sixty million years now? Since the Paleocene epoch, anyway; right after the dinosaurs kicked it. The family there….” He gestured vaguely to the South American contingent. “Says it only makes sense because I’m next thing to a dinosaur myself, doctrinally speaking. Fuckin’ post-modernist theology; we’re all headed straight to hell there, I tell ya, since even if I’m a good boy myself, I’ll still feel obliged as a priest to go along and hold everyone’s hand through the pain. What can you do. You pray, you pay.” 

Potter said nothing more, just took a deep breath, screwed up his face in concentration… And _hissed_ at him. Shocked gasps rang out.

“Listen to the baby!” the priest laughed again, surprised and genuinely tickled. “Wait, weren’t you supposed to lose the Parseltongue along with the horcrux?”

“Pars… You’re a _Parselmouth,_ Potter?” Neville breathed in delighted awe. “That’s _brilliant!”_

“It is?” Potter blinked at him, distracted. “I mean… You really think so?”

“Of course! Why wouldn’t I? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Well, they _were_ pretty clear that the standard response there is  ‘Eeee, get back, get back, great evil Dark-Wanker-in-Training.'”

“How would being born with the ability to speak a language make anybody evil?” Neville asked, honestly puzzled. “It’s _biology._ Magically driven biology, maybe, but still just a matter of recessive versus dominant genes.”

“How the hell do you know about recessive and dominant genes?" someone asked blankly. “You didn’t have any exposure to the Nomaji till you graduated from Hogwarts.”

“I read. Teaching children how to do that is a tradition on my world. Alternatively, when I have a question and no access to the proper resources, I ask Gran, and if she isn’t sure, she takes me to the library.”

“But what kind of questions could _you_ have about genes?"

“Put a sock in it already, Foster,” Al snapped. “Before I…”

A loud, buzzing headache was beginning to form behind Neville’s eyes... He was suddenly and absolutely, _absolutely_ tired of being polite.

“I wanted to know whether Bellatrix Black was insane,” he cut him off. Loudly. “Or whether she was just plain evil. And if she was insane, what made her that way, because the kind of insanity she had was obviously different from the kind my mum and dad have to deal with, and I’d heard she inherited it from her family, and I wanted to know if I’d inherit it from my parents too. Gran’s getting on now, and would have obviously aged out of the possibility, but I was only six. I was worried about what would happen to her if she had three of us to take care of.”

“They told me I would, yeah,” Potter said to Tony Silva in the deep, heavy silence that followed _that_. “They appear to have been mistaken. Again.”

“On… Sorry?” Tony Silva’s dark green, gold-shadowed eyes tore themselves away from Neville.

“Being a Parselmouth. Big Harry’s knack came with being a horcrux, they said, but the history books here say that the Potters are descended from the Peverells way back when, and since they had them as common ancestors with the Gaunts, going back to Salazar Slytherin, it means that I prolly inherited the family tendency there along with Riddle. Only nobody could know that till I got here, because till I did, I was a horcrux too.”

“Mm.” The eyes moved over to Neville again. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Don’t you already know?”

“Introductions. They’re a thing. I know who your counterpart is, yeah, but I’ve never met you, have I?”

“Ah. Alright.” Shoving the headache back, Neville transferred the remains of his donut to his left hand before holding it out, working around the napkin deftly so that none of the sticky actually touched the man’s fingers.  “Neville Frank Longbottom, at your service. You can call me Longbottom. And for the record? I’m not a baby goat.”

“So noted. You can call me Padre Tony. Now. I know we’ve just met, but would you two buttons mind doing me a personal favour and running along for a bit? I promise to fill you in on the essentials later, personally - your version of the essentials, not mine - but this next bit isn’t gonna have a fuckin’ family rating if you know what I mean, and Jesus’ll get all with the whoop up my own ass if I don’t warn you off there, can you say amen.”

“We’re not buttons either.” Potter paused, nose wrinkling at him. “What does that mean, anyway?’

“It’s from ‘cute as a button.’” Neville translated, before the man could respond. “And you can’t complain on that one, because you _totally_ are.” He patted his cheek _a la_ Auntie Niss again. Al and Scorpius sniggered. “We both are. How about that? Someone here actually got something about us right for a change. Now, come on. I have to go mark that day I’m destined to start learning about the Nomaji in my calendar.”

“You’re really weird, Ace.” Potter followed him out obediently. “Did anyone ever tell you that?’

“No. It’s a completely new experience for me. Ooh, you don’t think I’m ahead of my own schedule there too, do you? Being me is just so hard, and I never knew it would be so easy to get it all wrong.”

"Lucky for you they have books for that here. How- _to_ manuals, even. I’ve got my own personalized edition that they had waiting when I arrived. It makes scheduling in my development of character and personality just ever so much simpler.”

The door closed behind them. Neville managed to make it down the first hall and just around the corner before he slumped against the wall, palms pressed to his eyes.

“Ace?” Potter said, alarmed. “Ace, what’s wrong?’

“I just need a minute,” Neville said. The headache was suddenly splintering. He staggered and leaned heavily against the wall again, sliding down. His vision was fading in and out, and it was suddenly almost impossible to breathe. “I need to… I need to go my room, I… Too much stuff in my head, too much new stuff, they were all talking and talking and _screaming;_ they wouldn’t _stop_ , and now the voices are all mixed up and I can’t tell; I can’t _tell,_ because they won’t _stop,_  they never never ever...”

“Shh. Shh.” Potter skidded to his skinny little knees, petting at him anxiously: his arm, his shoulder, his hair, with one hand first, then both. “It’s okay, Ace. It’s going to be okay, I promise. I’ll make it okay, alright? Here. Come with me. Your room’s not warded like mine, you can come to mine and I’ll just…. I’ll leave you alone if you want to be alone, I’ll go in the library and shut the door and I won’t bother you, but you can’t go to your own room, Ace;  the big loo’s right across from it and if someone comes up… Just... Here, stand up and come with me, alright? I’ll take care of you, I promise, you just have to come with me.” He tugged at him ineffectually. Neville managed to muster just enough strength to stumble to his feet again before a huge wave of dizziness overtook him, and he crumpled, unconscious, to the floor.

* * *

He woke slowly. He was warm and his head felt floaty and quiet. The room was dim, and there was cool water dripping down into his ears, and a light, sweet voice singing.

 

**_Halfway down the stairs is a stair where I sit_ **

**_There isn't any other stair quite like it_ **

**_I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top_ **

**_So this is the stair where I always stop_ **

 

**_Halfway up the stairs isn't up and isn't down_ **

**_It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town_ **

**_And all sorts of funny thoughts they run through my head_ **

**_It isn't really anywhere, it's somewhere else instead_ **

 

**_Halfway down the stairs is a stair where I sit_ **

**_There isn't any other stair quite like it_ **

**_I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top_ **

**_So this is the stair where I always stop._ **

 

“Nrgh,” Neville mumbled, and brushed at his ear.  He opened one eye, realizing why the room was dark. His head was half-draped in a soggy towel. “Wha…”

“Ace! You're awake!"

“Well spotted. Why’m I all wet?’

“Wha… Oh. I just was putting a cold cloth on your head. Aunt Petunia does it for Dudders when he has a headache.” Potter pulled it away and examined it. “Sorry. I reckon I didn’t squeeze out enough of the drips. Are you feeling better?’

“Yeah, I..” He tried to sit up and failed miserably. “Ow. What happened?’

“I don’t know. Padre Tony says you had too much going on upstairs, and too many people around since it’s usually just you and your Gran, and it prolly all caught up with you.”

“Too much… Did he go in my head?" He did sit up at that, alarmed, and cried out in pain.

“Don’t _move!_ Lie down, okay, Ace? Here, I’ll get... RUBY!”

“Master Harry?’ Ruby popped in anxiously. “What… Oh! Longbottom! You is being awake!”

“Can you bring Frankie up, Ruby? Only he’s really upset, and keeps trying to get up, and it hurts his head.”

Ruby cracked out. Seconds later she re-appeared, Frankie in tow. He was at Neville’s side immediately,

“Shhh, Ace,” he soothed him. “You’re fine. Everything’s alright. Gave us one bloody bugger of a scare, mind, but it came with an excuse to kick everyone out, so it’s all good.”

“Did he go in my head?” Neville said, panicked.

“What? Who? Oh. You mean Tony? No, no. Shhh. No. He’s a priest, he doesn’t do that. It’s against their vows. And he wouldn’t let anybody else do it either, no more than I would.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” He gave him a little hug. “You don’t have to worry about him. There’s nothing _to_ worry about, I promise, no matter how loud and obnoxious he can be. Once you get to know him a bit better, you’ll realize it’s just who he is: bigger and louder than life in every way, but with a bloody heart of gold. The yelling’s just chronic frustration, really, with people who refuse to be kind and loving and self-aware of all the pain they pass around to each other without thinking on the potential consequences. Comes with being a Warder, and a priest again.”

“He’s the one Big Harry wrote about in his letter, remember, Ace?" Potter said anxiously. “Tony Silva; the one who he recommended as a teacher, to teach us to use two wands, if we wanted it? He said he was brilliant, remember, the nicest person ever? And Frankie says he’s Big Harry’s godson, just like he is, Frankie I mean, so _that’s_ alright, innit?”

”I don’t… I don’t know, I…”

“Well, I do.” Frankie’s voice was strong and firm. “He’s my best friend in the world, Ace. My friend like Dad and Big Harry were - are -  friends, and like Al and Scorp are.” He reflected. “Well, maybe not quite like Al and Scorp are. We’ve got a bit more dignity with it, hopefully. Lie back, alright? You’re going to be fine, but you do need to rest."

He lay back. Potter adjusted his pillows fussily and shuffled up a bit, sitting cross-legged and pressed against his legs as he petted his knee. “Nobody’s going to bother you,” he reassured him. “I’ll bite them if they try. And then I’ll let Scuttle bite them, before he has his morning crickets.”

Frankie’s lips twitched in wonder at the sight. Neville couldn’t help but laugh.

“You’re alright, Potter,” he said, and awkwardly. “I’m sorry for scaring you. What happened?”

“You’ve had a lot to deal with in a very short time,” Frankie said. “A lot. It just got a bit too much, all at once, and your ability to process went on a walk for a bit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Jesus fucking _Christ,_ will you please stop _apologizing!”_ He seemed to struggle himself, breathing deeply as he wiped at the water in his eyes. “None of this, _none_ of it, is on you!”

‘What’s going to happen?” Potter asked anxiously. “Are we still going to be able to get home?’

“Yes,” he reassured him. “Astra said to tell you that everything’s just fine there. She had a look at the notes Bill had saved, and it’s a bloody buggering miracle, but whatever the hell they did hasn’t actually affected anything else. Not in terms of the Gate, anyway. Don’t tell anybody, she’s gone all Gran on everybody involved on principle, but she’s actually a bit impressed at how they managed it, on the purely technical level, anyway.”

“He’s nutters,” Neville opined. “They all are. _Dragons? Really?”_

“It’s all been said,” Frankie said. “Trust me, and will be on rinse and repeat for quite some time.” He grimaced. “We’re going to be sticking close to home for awhile, chaps. The last thing either of you need is to be out and about while the world is busy being gleefully scandalized over the official revelation of Uncle Harry’s biographical post-script.”

“What about the prophecy?"

There was a small silence.

“Well… Here’s the thing, Ace,” the older man said finally.  “No one, no matter the interpretation we come up with… Well. There’s not a lot we can do about it, is there? Aside from the fact that it could mean anything, really… The damage, from our end is done. And there’s just… There’s no way to fix it, see? Not from our end.”

 _“What_? But…”

“It’s complete rubbish,” Potter said shortly. “Most of ‘em don’t even want to try. Typical, really. They make a big mess, there’s a prophecy about it, they all say ‘woe, woe, oh well, nothing to be done', and it’s all down to Big Harry and Big Nev to fix the results of the things that they didn’t think on. Again.”

“But… It’s the end of the _world!”_

"It’s a one-in-three chance of the end of the world,” Potter corrected. “And it’s not _their_ world, is it? There’s a whole bloody load of them, like I said, who want to just shut down the Gate right now in the hope that it’ll solve that bit about ‘all will be decided and the bridge broken forever’, and the rest will take care of itself, and multiverse’ll be safe after all. Only one world lost, and oh well. It’s just the world, not the universe it's in, right? Planets blow up all the time, and life goes on everywhere else around them.”

“But _we’re_ here! We don’t _belong_ here!”

“And you don’t think they’d be in with keeping us?” It was breathtakingly cynical. “We’ll be nothing but their second chance again, now that they’re in a place to see how they screwed up with Big Harry. They’ll have him to do all over again. Through me, and since we’re friends now, they’re prolly going to decide that we’re meant to be too. They won’t even care if either of us is bent, they’ll kidnap us and drag us to the wedding they plan for us as soon as we turn seventeen. Then they’ll spent the next hundred thirty years following us around and telling us that they’re alright with it, to fix their consciences. They’ll prolly even hold some kind of contest or lottery to pick the girl who gets to have our babies. Put it all over the telly and the crystal network, and tell them they have to send in adverts for everybody to select from and everything."

Frankie winced. Neville looked from one to the other.

“They can’t _do_ that,” he said panic blooming. “They can’t _do_ that, we have to go _back!_ We can’t go back if they shut it _down!_ I don’t want to stay here! I want to go back, to Gran and Mum and Dad, and Uncle Luke, and I promised I’d help him, I promised... I can’t stay here! And what if they close it, and the world _doesn’t_ end? Gran will never know where I am, Big Nev will just disappear at fourteen, and I’m all she’s got! She’s getting on, who’s going to take care of my parents if I’m here; Uncle Algie won’t do it, he doesn’t care about them, not at all, he’s never visited once, not once,  and she… And Uncle Luke will have to go in, and I won’t be there to help, and it’s why I came here really, so there’d be a ninety eight percent chance that he wouldn’t _have_ to!”

“Shh, shh.” Frankie caught him up, holding him tightly as he shook. Potter scooched even closer, petting at his shoulder and hair. “Nobody’s going to close anything, Neville, I promise. Just because it was brought up as a possibility and a lot of people are behind it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. There are fail-safes built in, one of which, though no one knows it, and set up by Uncle Harry again, is that deliberately collapsing it would require Astra’s wand.”

“What? Why would he do that?"

“Because he trusted her,” he said. “Not to make or allow idiotic decisions. The two of them were partners in all this, equal partners, really. Her gift for arithmancy there matches his for runes and wards, and the two aspects were opposite sides of the necessary coin in this case. One wouldn’t have done any good without the other.”

“Really?” He sniffled and pulled back. Potter shoved a hanky at him. He blew. “Does that mean… How _did_ you understand all those equations, Potter?  The ones that let you understand what they’d done?’

Potter hesitated. Frankie looked over.

“I didn’t, really,” he admitted. “Not all of them. Some of them, yeah, but mostly the theory behind them, not the actual numbers part. It’s just…”

“Just…”

“Remember those binders Big Harry left me? The ones that he said are mine, and not to let anybody else see, or they’d take them away?”

“Yeah?’

“There’s more than runes in them,” Potter said. “It’s the whole history of the Project, done up just for me. He explained how he did each bit, how he got his ideas. Where the ideas came from. From things in his - our - history.  There’s technical stuff too, and lots of arrows and things, and I dunno. He made it all really easy to understand. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, really, and the equations are there too, and it’s just… Fitting them together. Fitting _us_ together, to see how what bits of us are in the equations. He never said metaphors, but that’s what it is. Everything that … Everything that he saw, comes from something in our past. It’s why he said not to let anybody else see it. Because it’s private. It’s _ours.”_

Neville sat up at that, hitching himself up.

“Can I see?” he asked.

Potter looked torn.

“Can you give me an example?’ he persisted. “Just one?’

“I dunno, I…” He fidgeted. “The song that I was singing, when you woke up just now?"

“Yeah. ‘Halfway Down.’ A.A. Milne. ‘When We Were Very Young.’ The Queen gave me a copy when I was four.”

“I heard it the first time when I was five,” Potter said. “Aunt Petunia bought the book for Dudders, for his birthday. She tried to read it to him, and he thought it was rubbish and wouldn’t listen. I liked it, though. When I was in school, my first year teacher read it too, and I remembered it again, because she played the song that was made from it. And I’ve remembered the song.”

He shifted. Neville waited.

“The staircase at the Dursleys has thirteen steps,” Potter said. “I …” He looked a bit agonized, but determined. “I lived in the cupboard under the stairs, there.”

_“What?”_

“Later, Ace,” Frankie said gently. “Go on, Harry.”

“There were thirteen steps,” Potter said. “Six up, six down, and the one between. Dudders would… He liked to run down the steps, and he’d jump on the seventh one, really hard, every time. It made dust and stuff, and spiders fall on me. And it would break my light bulb sometimes. I had to take it out at night, or when I wasn’t there, so it wouldn’t break. Or I’d have to live in the dark. Aunt Petunia only gave me one on the first of the month. Anyway. The light was under the seventh step. The one in the song. Not halfway up, or halfway down, but somewhere else. I was… Big Harry and me… We were what was behind the seventh step. We were somewhere else. Not here, not there, just… somewhere different. And when he started thinking about the Project… It went back to that, see? There’s here and there, and they balance. But we… We lived in between. In the place on an equation where the equal sign would be. In the place that’s somewhere else, and everywhere else. Anywhere else but here or there. In the cupboard under the stairs.”

A scuffle sounded behind them in the terrarium.

“An equal sign,” Potter said. “It’s two lines. One on top of each other, with a space in between. It looks a bit like a door, really. Or… Or a gate, because the ends are open. You can go through. It’s not closed off, see? So one half the equation, is here. The other half is there. And the equal sign… The space in between… That’s where we went all through, to get here. Here _is_ there, if both sides are perfectly, perfectly balanced. The one’s the same as the other. It’s all the _same,_ and you can get through, if you go through the cupboard under the stairs right at the moment when you put the bulb in, and it lights up the dark. And you take the bulb out, right, to protect it, but the memory of light is still there. It takes a few seconds for your eyes to see that it’s dark again.  They remember the light. You have the memory of the lit in-between space, of somewhere and everywhere and anywhere… In that time, those few seconds… If you define it with runes, and you program it right, with the right vectors - that’s the arithmancy - the runic memory, that’s still there when you collapse the warding fences, can last as long as you need it to. In this case… Two to five years.”

Frankie reached out and touched his shoulder, and pulled away.

“That’s just one example,” Potter said, looking down and picking at the pillow now in his lap. “All the rest of it’s the same way. He didn’t… He told me not to give it to everybody else because of the runes part. Because the runes part… Is us. It’s our real history. Not the stuff in the books. But the stuff we keep in our book, on the little shelf in the cupboard.”

“Why do you think that he said to give it to _Senhora_ Hernandez de Silva?’ Neville asked after a moment. “Padre Tony’s mum, isn’t she?’

“Yeah. I guess he trusts her. He didn’t say just her. He said Frankie and Stella and her. He was telling me who I could trust here. And he said two more people, you and Padre Tony again.”

Neville pulled his knees up and leaned back against Frankie. He held him comfortably.

“Just because you don’t see something,” he quoted. “Doesn’t mean it’s not there. And what you see, is never all that there is.”

“Huh?’

“Two of Uncle Luke’s rules,” he said. “There are five. Well, six if you count the keeping your sense of humour part. That’s not a rule though, really. That’s a vital necessity.”

“What are the other three?”

“When in doubt, go with your gut,” Neville said. “And if you end up going off the marked map and run into unexpected dragons… Don’t blink.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a metaphor. For human dragons. If they see you’re nervous or worried, they’ll eat you. Take advantage.” he translated. “If you want to stay in control of what’s happening, you have to keep your eyes open.”

“Oh. And number five?’

“That one’s more mine. Keep your pocket handkerchief handy. You might not need it, but if you do, and it’s always there, you won’t have to do without.”

Potter laughed. Neville patted his knee, then frowned suddenly.

“What?"

“Why was there music?” he asked. “Was that you, singing?’

“Huh?”

“When I jumped, I heard music. It was all around me.”

“Oh. No.” He revived a bit. “That was phoenix song.”

_“What?”_

"They defined the space,” he explained. “The cupboard, between the two lines of the equal signs, right, with runes and vectors, and ran the door through the Room of Requirement. But there had to be something to light the bulb, right? To initiate the magics.  And phoenixes are special, and understand that in-between place too. Because when they burn, that’s where they go, between here and there, and life and death, heaven and earth. Big Harry reckons that why his first wand - it was holly and phoenix feather - was called to him, maybe, partly anyway, because they identified with each other, because they both knew that spot. So when they activated the gate here, well, even when they built the Gate - every single wand used, without exception, had phoenix feather cores. And in the in-between place, when you’re inside the Moment, somewhere, everywhere, anywhere - that’s what’s there. That’s what you hear. All of the phoenixes, or the memories of them, channeled through the wands, all in the one spot where it’s not really living or dying… Singing, and pushing and guiding you through with their magics. Through the place where they remember, all of them, and you’re sure to get to your destination properly, because they… They all know the _way_.”

Neville’s mouth dropped open, his face lighting in sheer delight at the imagery.

“That’s brilliant,” he breathed. “That’s just… _wicked!”_

Potter actually grinned at him - a huge, genuine, equally delighted grin. “It really is a bit, innit?” he said.

“So Astra’s wand has a phoenix feather core?”

“Actually,” Frankie said. “Astra’s wand is Uncle Harry’s first wand. When he learned to work with two, he had to switch things up a bit because when you’re working two-handed you do a lot better with a matched set. It’s not necessary, but it helps, and he was working in such a dangerous environment as an Auror, all the time, that he needed every advantage he could get. So he got new ones, and set his aside, and whenever a kid in the family started Hogwarts, they’d have a go with it. It just sat there, though, humming to itself, until Astra came along.  He brought it in so she could try it out, here to Longbottom Manor… The second she touched it… You could hear it singing from one end of Lancashire to the other.”

“I reckon that’s one of the reasons why we get along so well,” Potter told him. “Me and Astra, I mean. I think her phoenix thinks I’m Big Harry burned and gone young again. Or his son or something. Anyway, it feels really nice. She let me hold it, when I first came, and I’m nine, it didn’t work or anything, but it definitely knew me.”

“What happened to Big Nev’s wand?’ Neville asked, interested. “When he Crossed?’

“We have it downstairs,” Frankie said. “He told us that if you’re here past the time you start school, to have you give a go. I don’t think it’ll work for you, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because you did something that he never did. You told me and Potter something that he never told anybody, Ace. The one thing, really, that defined him. That defines both of you. And that’s the kind of thing that changes everything about you. You’re still squashy, you’ll still fit... But when it comes time, I reckon there’ll be another kind of wand that is drawn to who you are now.”

“D’you reckon that my Animagus form would still be a bear? Or would that change too?’

“No idea,’ his counterpart’s son said. “You’re not done changing anyway. Hopefully the mind-therapy we’ve got booked for you will help you progress along the less pants-wetting path.”

“Mm,” Neville agreed. He hesitated, remembering something else on the Archbishop’s compare-and-contrast edition. “Frankie?’

“Yeah?

“Is Padre Tony a mind-healer?’

“No. Why?”

“I’d rather talk to somebody who is doctrinally avowed not to tell anybody anything I tell him,” he said. “Promises and medical confidentiality are all very well, but Catholic priests _can’t_ tell, can they? By their vows?’

Potter looked up at that, alertly. “They can’t?”

“No. They can’t. Though… I’m not sure it counts if you’re not Catholic.”

“It wouldn’t matter to Tony,” Frankie said. “He’s not a mind-healer, but he’s really good to talk to. If you’re more comfortable with that, I’m sure he’d be happy to help.”

“I would,” Neville said decisively. “I mean, I am. More comfortable with it, I mean. Never mind that he seems to understand that Potter and I are our own people, not Big Harry or Big Nev.”

“Yeah,” Frankie said. “Sorry about that git down there who was going on about your mandated schedules, by the way.  He’s missing a few strips from where Tony ripped them off of him, believe you me.”

“Are they really all gone now?”

“Yeah. We’ll arrange other facilities for the rest of the big meetings, away from the Manor, and in the meantime, nobody’ll be nicking my ginger newts from behind the Mr. Smiley’s.”

“Where are they all staying?”

“You really need to do something about that tendency toward compulsive hospitality of yours, Ace,” Potter observed. “Manners are one thing, but self-preservation’s important too.”

“A-fucking-men.” Frankie ruffled his hair, and heaved himself up. “Alright. You boys relax, and call if you need anything. I’m going to go check on dinner.”

“What are we having?’ Potter asked, diverted.

“Roast beef and treacle tart for you, and curry and sticky toffee pud for the rest of us. Would you like me to put a few bits of veg aside there for you, just in case the mood to branch out hits?”

“Miracles have happened before,” Potter said. “Then again, they’re called miracles for a reason. No thank you.”

Frankie laughed. “What have you got against veg?’ Neville inquired as he made his way down the stairs, whistling. “They’re quite nice, the way he does them up.”

“I like potatoes,” Potter said. “Potatoes are veg, yeah?” He swung his legs over and peered into the terrarium. “Where’s ‘Arry’s ickle baby? Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

The leaves rustled again. Neville shuddered as Potter stuck his arm through the not-glass and hauled out Scuttle.

“Not on the _bed,_ Potter!”

“Poor baby,” Potter cooed at the rune spider as he plunked himself down on the floor. “Don’t worry. ‘Arry still wuvs you, yes ‘e does!” Scuttle hissed and clambered up on his head, kneading his hair furiously and happily.  Neville shuddered again, and looked away, but not before the spider’s single forelimb pushed aside a thick swathe of black, gold-tipped hair to reveal that small bald spot beneath. The limb moved, and the hair fell back. Potter settled the spider in his lap, and smoothed the patch automatically, firmly. Neville frowned,his mind jumping back involuntarily, Lucius Malfoy’s voice sounding in his memory again.

 _"I want you to remember something, Neville. Internalize it. It may very well save your life one day. Just because you cannot see something does not mean that it is not there - and, conversely - that which you see before you, is never all that there is. There is always,_ always _more to any given situation than there appears.”_

“Potter,” Neville said abruptly.

“Mm?” He hummed happily to the spider. “Itsy bitsy spider/went up the water spout…”

Something niggled. Something _itched._ Neville shuffled back through his memories, rapidly, sorting, resorting, rearranging…

**_"Don't you know you do it?”_ **

_"I did it at the Dursleys, but only in my head. They didn't like it. I reckon maybe it's because when I came through I cracked my skull, and now it all leaks out."_

The itch deepened. Neville shuffled and shuffled, ever more frantically.

_"I had a rougher trip than you did. You just sicked up a bit with it, and only for the one evening. I was sicking up on and off for a week, and cracked my skull and a few ribs too, and had bruises all over me, and the crack might've been what did  in my balance, they reckon, and that's why I can't fly. It affected my vision too; there was a big bit of glass got in one eye from my glasses, so they actually had to do surgery there, and pull out the phoenix tears."_

**_"What? Are you_ ** **serious?** **_They never told me that that could happen!"_ **

_“I'm fine now. And they said the return trip'll be a lot easier, because it's all downhill."_

**_"I would still liked to have known it was a_ ** **possibility!** **_Why wouldn't Big Nev tell me it was? That's not right at all! I definitely would have told him, if it had been the other way round!"_ **

Neville pushed himself up and stared at the boy before him. Potter looked up.

“What?” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“The phoenixes pushed you through,” he said. “Us through. In the place between here and there.”

“Yeah?”

“The place between life and death,” he said. “Where phoenixes are healed, after they’re burned?’

“I dunno. I reckon so, yeah. Why?’

_"Why wouldn't Big Nev tell me it was? I would have told him, if..."_

“How could you get hurt, Potter,” he said. “In a place where you’re supposed to be healed?”

“Uh?” He looked caught off guard. Caught off guard… And trapped.

_"If that's different, what else is different?"_

_"Anything could be happening over there, Longbottom. Anything."_

"You would have been healed, if you’d gotten hurt on the way over. If you went through, though, already hurt… The magics might have just assumed that that was how you were supposed to be, and sent you straight on the way you started. Did you get your cracked ribs and head coming through," Longbottom of Longbottom demanded. "Or before?"

_"What?"_

"You said you got hit on the head with a _frying pan! When did it happen?"_

Potter's mouth opened, and closed, trapped.

"What does it matter," he said weakly. "I'm better now."

"What do you mean, what does it… It matters because nobody _knows_ , Potter! And Big Harry was headed back into that!"

" _He_ knows! And he's a grown up! He can protect himself!"

"The worlds are _different_ , Potter! What if it wasn't as bad for him? What if all the stuff that happened to both of you that wasn't in the history books... What if he doesn't know it all, because it - even just that _one thing_ \- didn't happen to him? And yes, he can protect himself, but what if they get to him before he knows it's that bad? Or what if he wakes up in a whole load of blood and to the entire _situation_ , and realizes 'hey, this didn't happen when I was nine, oops, can't have gone back in time, must have gone sideways' and there goes the whole bloody _Plan_ , Potter, from the very first _second!"_

Potter's eyes grew huge. Neville dropped his face in his hands, breathing heavily and frantically. _Don’tblinkdon’tblinkdon’t_

"Nobody's going to _check_ on him! Not for two years! They thought it was the same universe, Potter, but it's _not!"_

"But..." he said weakly. "The prophecy... The man and the child… And he got Black out of Azkaban right, you told us that you read about it in the paper,  so that means he was fine!”

“That only means he got him out! That’s _all_ it means!  He’d do that anyway, no matter what was going on there! No matter _where_ he ended up, after he got there, _or_ what he knew! As for the prophecy...  That could mean Big Nev too! He's a man, I'm a child... _There weren't any other descriptives!_ And prophecies are stupid, they can mean anything, right, or be interpreted a million different ways… It might even mean something else altogether!”

 _"Bugger."_ He looked on the verge of tears. "It's _private,_ Ace! And if it didn't happen to him, it's _really_ private! And what if they can't do anything anyway?"

"And what if they can?" Neville demanded. "What if they _can_? We won't know if they can, till they tell us they can't, and if they did the Project in the first place, there _is_ no can't they can't make into a can!" He collected himself, and paused as another thought struck him. " _Are_ you actually bad at flying?" he asked. "Or are you just faking it?"

"Huh?"

"Big Harry could fly. You can't. If you got that injury from a great bloody frying pan, and not the cross-world trip, and can't fly as a result, Potter, it means that we know he never got hit. Only, you're the only one who knows for _sure,_ aren't you!"

Potter said nothing. Longbottom slid out the bed, grabbed Scuttle, tossed him back in the terrarium, turned Potter about and started to shove him toward the stairs.

“Ace, no, you’re sick! You need to lie down; Frankie said, he _said,_ Ace, you need to…”

“MOVE!” It was a roar. And Potter moved - reluctantly, protesting, but he moved. Neville steered him out of the tower and down several halls to the kitchens… A cheerful tousle of laughing adult voices met them, and stopped abruptly as he pushed Potter through. Frankie lowered his ladle, from where he was standing by the stove. Scorpius, Al, Lily, James, Stella, Astra, a man that Neville recognized as her husband Pollux, Tony Silva, and another, delicately aged woman - long, thin and lanky and quintessentially elegant, with white hair trimmed nearly to her skull, deep copper skin, sharp brown eyes and eyebrows poised as if they were about to take flight off her face - all looked over as one, startled.

“Ace, what…”

"Ask them," he ordered. Potter's mouth opened and closed, fish-like.

“Neville?” Stella said, rising. “Potter? What’s wrong?”

“ASK THEM!”

Potter shifted.

"Erhm," he said. "When I fell off the broom. On Christmas Day. Was that... Was that really because of my head injury? The crack in my head, that... That I got coming through? Or maybe… D’you think it’s just a natural difference between me and Big Harry after all?”

The adults looked at each other.

"It's a possibility," Lily said gently. "Yes, but the probability’s much higher on the first, Harry.  The injury was in the right place to affect your balance permanently, and yes, certain of your finer reflexes. We didn't think... But it was a pretty hard knock, even if you do have that really hard noggin. We're hoping you'll get better, but... We'll just have to wait and see."

"Why'd you send me up there, then?" he demanded. "if you knew it was a possibility that I'd fall?"

"We didn't," James said bluntly. "You're a Magical. Brain damage of the long-lasting, strictly physical variety is almost unheard of, especially if you're treated immediately, and Lily fixed you up as soon as you came through."

There was a dire pause.

"Tell them," Longbottom of Longbottom said to him fiercely. " _Tell_ them!"

A small hand gripped his in its agony. Neville held his breath.

"What…” Potter blurted finally. “What if it wasn't... When I came through?"

"Huh?" James looked puzzled.

"What… What if... There was a day after it happened... And _then_ I came through?"

And time seemed, quite suddenly, to stop.

"What," Al said.

"It was Aunt Petunia," Potter said miserably. He stared down at his feet, quite incapable of looking anyone in the eyes. "I blew up the stove. By accident. Only Dudders... He shoved me in, see? I was doing breakfast dishes, and he was watching a film on the telly. A war film. And he came in to get a drink, and saw me and said I was rubbish, like... Like the people in the camps, and he thought it was funny, and shoved me in the oven, and ... And leaned against it, so I couldn't get out, and it was still hot and I burned my leg, and I blew it up, and Aunt Petunia grabbed the frying pan and hit my head. And Uncle Vernon stepped on me, and kicked me into the closet, and. And locked it. And I was sick, and sicked up, and I was really dizzy, I just wanted to sleep, so I put the mirror on the floor early, before I fell asleep... and lay on top of it, in case I missed the call. So I could… So I would… Just fall through. Without having to jump.”

 


	5. Reckoning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Shit - and Memory - Comes Down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ARGH. PULLING... WORDS...ON. THIS. CHAPTER. WAS. LIKE... PULLING TEETH, PEOPLE! But on the other hand, it's another long one. :) 
> 
> NRGH!
> 
> KEEP AN EYE ON THE DATES. This chapter takes place at Longbottom Manor, but in two different universes and time periods. Should be fairly easy to follow, hence no font changes...
> 
> Nomaji Poetic References : C.S. Lewis, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling, and J.K. Rowling (Pottermore quotes from Chocolate Frog cards).
> 
> Comments are love! :)

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

The rain began, appropriately enough, in the moments following Potter’s revelations: a measured, steady downpour that spilled in purple and silver sheets from the close-eyed, shuttered sky. A deep spring wind, too, blew, all through the afternoon and evening and night and morning following, rattling around the tiles and tilting and spraying the water channeled through the eavestroughs through the greenery surrounding the ancient Manor. The spray, in turn, washed across the glass of all of the windows, weaving a constant unsettled and meandering web of light and shadow that drifted in slow, restless patterns  across the interior walls and ceilings.

Enclosed within the walls, under the ceilings, in a parlour on a sofa a hundred twenty-seven years in his own future,  a nine-year-old boy sat with his feet tucked up and head tilted back as he watched the wheel of the past, distant and not, turning and turning behind his unfocused eyes.

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**January, 1990**

At the prompt stroke of midnight, when the last of the leftover curry-and-associated had been packed into the containers, the containers tucked into their bag, and the bag tucked into its pocket in Uncle Luke’s robe, a most unexpected third personage decided to join Neville Frank Longbottom’s impromptu late evening soirée. Uncle Luke was just bending over to pick up a napkin he’d dropped when his wand popped, or rather ejected itself, from his back jeans pocket. It landed neatly and squarely on the bed, right before its startled host.

“Erhm,” Neville said tentatively. “Uncle Luke?”

“Yes?” Uncle Luke straightened, smiling. Even as he did so, the wand, long and strong and elegant as its owner himself, twisted and blurred. Neville gawped.

“What on _earth…”_ His godfather looked most alarmed. “Chama! What are you _doing?”_

 _“Shammy?”_ Neville repeated. “What’s a shammy?”

“‘Ah’,” Uncle Luke enunciated. “Not ‘ee’. It is a Portuguese word. It means flame, and is the name of my wand. I repeat: what do you think you are _doing?”_

“You named your wand?” Neville said, diverted. “Really? Who does that?”

“You would be surprised. And I did not name it. It is simply its name.” The man regarded the glistening, dead black, razor-thin-and-sharp fourteen-and-a-quarter inch thorn before him. It had an filigreed black iron crosspiece much like the hilt of a dagger or sword, and a small hole bored through the end, above the crosspiece again. A whisper-fine black chain was threaded through the hole. Neville suspected that it was a good deal stronger than it looked.

The working end of the wand, though...

“Are you hurt? It’s all over blood! Did it cut you when it jumped out of your pocket like that?”

“I am fine,” his godfather reassured him. “It is simply the colour of the wood.” He picked up the dagger/wand/what-have-you by the crosspiece and regarded it. “Well?”

The dagger/wand/what-have-you, unsurprisingly, said nothing, just glimmered at him blackly and blandly. The red tip didn’t just glimmer; it _glistened._  

_Wetly._

“Mm,” Uncle Luke said repressively. “Are we feeling the urge to channel our core’s familial tendency to melodrama today, then?”

“It’s not actually talking to you, is it?” Neville said tentatively. “In your head, or something like?”

“No.” Uncle Luke set it down precisely between them. Neville closed the book before him and offered his unexpected guest his full attention. “Master Neville Frank Longbottom, Chama. Chama,  Master Neville Frank Longbottom, Head of House Longbottom. He comes with my personal recommendation. So, I suppose, and despite your rather rude interjection of self into what you know very well was supposed to be a private conversation, do you.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Chama,” the Head of House Longbottom said politely. “Welcome to my home. That’s Longbottom Manor in Lancashire if you were wondering, right on the south-central edge of the Forest of Bowland and just below Longridge Fell.”

And the thorn/dagger/wand/what-have-you spun neatly, bounced up on its tip, and bowed. Neville broke out in a grin, delighted, but before it could take full hold of his expression…

The wand bounced again, straight at him. Startled, he brought his hands up to shield his face - and yelped as that razored red tip sliced neatly into his right thumb.

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

In the distance, somewhere in the house, someone was playing the piano. It wasn’t Frankie, Neville knew - he was down in the kitchens, baking, as he had throughout the night, with dedicated, blind and mindless focus. Stella was out in Greenhouse Eight: currently under construction and the only one of the vast complex on the left side of the Manor that Neville wasn’t allowed to enter. Pollux and Astra had disappeared with Carlotta Hernandez de Silva the day before, less than an hour after the revelations again, along with James and Lily.  Al and Scorpius had stayed a bit longer, but a floo call had summoned them away before supper, and they hadn’t returned.

That left Padre Tony. In the moments following Potter’s words - _I put the mirror on the floor early, before I fell asleep... and lay on top of it, in case I missed the call. So I could… So I would… Just fall through. Without having to jump -_ when no one else could move, much less respond - the priest had come forward, kneeling right there on the flagstones on the floor before him. What he’d said next neither Neville, nor anyone else in the room, had understood; the words eased forth from his lips in Parseltongue, soft and slippery and oddly lyrical. Potter said nothing in return, but when Padre Tony stood and bent and lifted him in his arms, Potter, shockingly, hadn’t protested or struggled, just pressed his face into his neck and clung, scrawny limbs wrapped around him as a half-equipped broken little spider.  Padre Tony said something else, again in Parseltongue, and the two flashed out abruptly.

“It’s alright,” Stella reassured Neville, at his alarmed look. “He’s taken him somewhere where they can talk.”

“Oh.” Neville sank down on a stool. In the renewed silence, Frankie poured him a cup of tea and put it in front of him, along with a squeeze bottle of honey. The bottle was shaped like a bear. Neville tilted it, watching as the gold stream spiraled down into the dark brown depths. _Madness and despair,_ he thought inconsequentially. _Halfway up and_ _halfway_ _down, a stair where I sit. There isn’t any other stair quite like it. It’s all a matter of subjective perspective, my godmother says._

In the parlour the next day, on the sofa, his feet tucked up and the piano playing in the distance, Neville squeezed his eyes shut and called up a mental image of a huge wheel. In his mind, he spun it hard, redirecting the attached visualized arrow that was targeting the specific memory. It was no use. The arrow moved, but reluctantly, bouncing back and vibrating in its original position.

Living as he had his whole life in an old Manor with old books and old memories, with only sporadic, distant sightings of members of his peer group, Neville had not so much as blinked at the understanding that he’d be spending two-to-five years in the constant care of people who were all, to the youngest man, actually older than Gran. Even when he’d met them all, he hadn’t blinked because, accustomed as he was the aged and aging environment,  he simply didn’t process them as old.

In that moment.. The moments following Potter’s revelation, in the moment… That changed. _An aged man is but a paltry thing,_ his memory hummed quietly. _A_ _tattered coat upon a stick..._

 _What,_ Albus Potter had said again after his father’s counterpart’s final statement, and then, simply, flatly and absolutely, as his very soul rejected not the words, or even the possibility, but the _implications…_

_No._

“Yes,” Neville said, and, immediately and hastily because he couldn’t just leave it _hanging_ there: it was just too _much,_ too _stripped,_ too bare _to_ bear... “Only if Potter got hit by the frying pan before he came through, and now he can’t fly for it, and Big Harry could fly, it means he - Big Harry - never got hit, you see? Not that one time, anyway. And he was heading back into it.”

It didn’t help. For one wild, frightened moment, he was honestly afraid he’d killed them all with it -  that from the look of them, he was standing before a suddenly manifested parliament of ghosts.

The first spell cast That Night, he recalled, had been Avada Kedavra, on the family mastiff, Meathead, caught out mid-launch in the split second after Frank Longbottom had a) answered the rung doorbell, b) recognized the grinning quartet, and c)  stepped aside to let the slavering, red-eyed demon loose while he Summoned his wand. Sixteen-month-old Neville, sucking mashed turnip awkwardly off his chubby little fist, made not a sound himself, just gazed wide-eyed as the jet of green light shot forth from Rabastan Lestrange’s wand and the dog’s body hit the floor with a soft, final thud.

 _Context,_ that no-longer-sixteen-month-old baby thought eight years later and back in the present, or rather future. _It’s all down to subjective perspective._  As if in response to the thought, amid the sudden and immobile paltry, tattered coats-upon-sticks surrounding him, vivid colour suffused, rather than drained from Albus Severus Potter’s faded cheeks and eyes. Neville watched, detached, as behind him, the alien rain-light streaming through the hanging ferns and herbs on the window swathed the kitchen in shadows, too, of flickering green. _Red is blood, of course, but green, not black, is death._

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**January, 1990**

“OWWWW!" Neville roared indignantly. "It _bit_ me!”

Uncle Luke was beside him immediately, lifting him into his lap as he took his hand swiftly and examined it. Even as he did so, the blood dripping down the side of Neville's palm, as well as the blood smearing the edge of the thorn, vanished. The cut healed over. The wand settled down again. Uncle Luke kissed the healed thumb and patted Neville’s back before reaching out and picking Chama up again.

“That,” he said to it, sounding extremely, _extremely_ displeased, “was unconscionably rude. I do not care what your intentions were; he is our host. Apologize. Now.”

There was, of course, no apology forthcoming, but the wand blurred again. Eighteen inches of elegantly carved elm lay dulcetly on the patchwork quilt beneath them.

“Very well,” Uncle Luke said. “If you are going to be like _that…”_ He picked up the wand and rammed it firmly back into his pocket. “Stay. And yes, that is an order.” He patted Neville’s back once more and boosted him off his lap, though he did not move away. “Alright then, Master Longbottom?”

“That depends. What was that all about?”

“I am not quite sure,” his godfather admitted. “Are you in pain?”

“No. I’m fine. Thank you for healing me.”

“I did not. Chama did. It may be rude on occasion, but it does have an aversion to leaving footprints. As for what it was about… I suspect it was testing your magical and personal mettle,” his godfather said. “And determining the reliability of my personal references for itself, in light of your proposed mutual and formal association with Malfoy and its own established interest in the resolution of our mutually stated goals.”

“Oh,” Neville said blankly. “Alright, then. Well, not alright; only biting someone you’ve just met _is_ really impolite, but alright.  Does it do that sort of thing often?”

“No. It does not. Then again, not many of my acquaintances have ever invited me to parlay in order to put forth the suggestion that they help me Get the Specific Thing Done.”

“I’m sure they would if they actually knew that you were trying to Get It Done,” Neville reassured him automatically. “It’s a sign of how good you are at your job, really, that none of them have till now, not any reflection or comment on your essential priorities or character or charisma.”

“Mm. Tell me something, Master Longbottom. Do you have a dictionary under that pillow of yours? Perhaps one that keeps company with a thesaurus?”

“No,” Master Longbottom said. “You have to know how to spell words before you can look them up in a dictionary. I just read a lot.”

“And your constant perusal of words has not served to impart upon you the appropriate order of letters and the niceties of proper punctuation and grammar?”

“I pay attention to what the words _say,_ Uncle Luke,” he said repressively. “Not to how they’re spelled. Also, yes. It has. But I’m nine. People expect you to have bad spelling when you’re nine, and it’s only polite to give them what they expect, isn’t it? Never mind prudent, and a crucial element in the ongoing evolution  of my proffered public image again. I trip over a lot of things,” he said patiently at the quizzical look. “And stutter. And I project those things into my writing. It provides another level of thematic veri _similitude_ , and serves to confirm and affirm the general public consensus that I’m stupid and have absolutely nothing to be going on with but the name.”

“Mm,” Uncle Luke said, and to his pocket - “I trust you are satisfied now? Yes? Excellent. You are hired, Master Longbottom.” He swung about and rearranged pillows comfortably, stretching his legs out as he propped himself up against the headboard and reached for one of the books of poetry. “Now. Let us see what we have here, shall we?”

“You’re staying?” his godson couldn’t help but ask hopefully.

“Statements of the obvious,” Riddle’s former Not-Quite-So-Much Dark-as-Morally-Glamoured General noted. “An excellent tactical choice, and one that will allow you to blend in perfectly with everyone in existence, on every level of society there is.”

“Thank you,” Neville said modestly. “I’ve worked hard on it. It drives Gran absolutely spare.”

“She quite likely is just worrying on you there,” Uncle Luke reassured him. “She is naturally subtle herself, and finds the thought of you exposing all of your trains of thought so chronically and readily alarming in the extreme.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t want to worry her. I just like seeing her go spare sometimes. Not because I’m mean, but because It’s good for her. She gets really tired, ‘specially after we visit Mum and Dad, and she doesn’t really have anybody to talk to about anything there besides the Queen. And going spare on _her_ would just be impolite.”

Uncle Luke laughed at that.

“So. What else has your wand got to be going on with? And you mentioned its core. What would that be again?’

“Phoenix feather. The shell is bloodthorn. An extremely rare combination. Rare to the point of the near-extinct, since as far as I know, it is only one of two of its kind in current existence.”

“Is that why you hide it? Because you’re afraid someone will try to steal it?”

“No. It would not matter if someone did steal it. No one else is able to channel magic through it but me. It is its nature.”

“It looks like it’d be good for more than just magic though,” Neville persisted. “Someone might want to take it  just so they could stick someone with it. With _style.”_

“It does not approve of that sort of thing,” Uncle Luke said dryly. “Save in certain very rare and dictated circumstances. Circumstances dictated to it by me, and on a very specific person. As for our inadvertent and enforced separation… It does not approve of that, either. I am not terribly adept at wandless magic, and there have been people over the years who have tried to take advantage of that in the moment.”

“That’s why the chain?”

“That is why the _appearance_ of the chain. It would not do me any favours were anyone to realize that I possess a weapon that is  immune to both Summoning and theft, never mind completely unbreakable as long as I am still alive, would it?

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” the boy agreed. “How long have you had it?”

“I crafted it when I was just turned seventeen. My original wand - the one that it disguises itself as since - broke. As I did not want anyone asking questions on its replacement, that replacement glamours itself as the original.”

"What else is special about it?'

Uncle Luke hesitated at that, most uncharacteristically. He pulled back and regarded Neville closely, tapping his long fingers on his raised knee as if trying to decide something. Finally...

"It might be a bit intelligent," he said.

Neville fell off the bed.

*

"Intel… “ He gawped ungraciously at  the man before him as he picked himself up off of the floor. “You mean it can _think?_ By _itself?_ Like a _person?”_

"Not quite. There is little to no information available on the subject, but insofar as my own experience is concerned, I have developed several theories.”

“What kind of theories?”

“An ordinary wand channels magic as it is directed by the will of its Magical," Uncle Luke explained. "But just as some woods are inclined to facilitate certain types of spells - willow works best for healing magic, for example, mahogany, fir and ebony for Transfiguration, and cedar for protective spells - bloodthorn is inclined toward mind magic. There is a peculiar differential there though, in that while it does facilitate it - legilimency in particular -  it actively and automatically reverses its focal point; that is, it reads its Magical, rather than allowing that Magical to read others, and not just while you are deliberately focusing power through it either. Because the bond with its Magical is sealed with a drop of your blood, it is able to tap into your core on its own. That drop of blood is, I believe, used to form a kind of external path between you and the wand, and your magic constantly travels along it to fuel it at any given moment.”

Neville frowned fiercely as he sorted through that.

“So it ends up as a metaphor for you?" he said tentatively. "A bit of you outside yourself, in the shape of the a wand?”

“I believe so,” Uncle Luke said. “Though… Not quite a metaphor. There is, you see, at the moment of bonding, quite excruciating pain. I think, perhaps, that it is the pain induced by a bit of your core - not your soul, but your core - being sliced away from of the original by the magic of the thorn. It does not quite separate, as you say; it remains linked by the drop of blood that forms the thread of the analogical path, allowing your power to travel between the main source and the shard, but it is still a singularly unpleasant experience. It would also explain why, once it bonds with one individual, it will never bond with another. It cannot, for as you said, it is you.”

“That’s very neat.”

“It is," his godfather agreed. "So. To summarize: at the moment of bonding, the core shard detaches from the whole, launching itself into the thorn, and the connecting magical ley path is created from the drop of blood. That ley path is unrefined at first: a rough and unfinished, if effective template of what it will be, but as time passes and your bond deepens, it becomes more complex and refined and polished, to the point where it is able not just to channel information on the types of magic you wish to perform in general terms, but to spot patterns there, based on what you request most frequently and forcefully. As the bond deepens even more, the shard begins to interpret what it reads in the patterns as your deepest priorities, and begins to reshape itself, as does a specific rune, to channel the magic it calls through the ley path into patterns of spells that will facilitate those priorities. Not your conscious priorities,” he emphasized. “Though you may or may not be aware of those that the wand taps into, but the ones that drive you. That define you.

“So it gives you what you don’t even know you need?”

“Yes. And if you attempt to cast a spell that does not support your priorities, it will not respond. So in a way, and though it is not precisely sentient, it is able to draw on your sentience to promote its understanding of your needs without you having to understand or explain them, and, as you are situationally aware, acts as an extra eye-about, turning its inner legilimentic eye outward to spot those things that you might not notice in a given moment, that might aid or distract you from your goals.”

“And what does the phoenix feather have to do?”

“It heals the link, and the chronically open wound of the sliced core. As you are always employing the shard and the path, the wound never gets a chance to heal over on its own. The power in the phoenix feather eases it, and keeps the surrounding tissue, so to speak, healthy.”

Neville reached out and touched the iron crosspiece. It was probably a bit rude, he knew, but...

"What are your priorities?” he wanted to know.

"To wipe Tom Riddle off the face of this earth," Lucius Malfoy said grimly. "As the disease and infection he is.”

“I didn’t feel any pain when it bit me, though,” Neville persisted. “I mean, not like you’re describing, anyway. So I don’t think it did anything to my core.”

“It did not,” Uncle Luke reassured him. “You did make a rather profound statement, though, Master Longbottom, in declaring yourself my new partner and refusing to take no for an answer. As I said, Chama would have heard you, and wanted to investigate the possibilities, and assess for itself your sincerity. Your own priorities, along the theme and otherwise. And blood magic is blood magic, if not Dark magic, and as the composition of your magical core is reflected in your blood on the cellular level, it was the easiest, quickest, most reliable way of determining whether you would actually be useful, and to what extent, and how.”

“Do you know what it thinks?’

“No idea. Our conversations do tend to be rather one-sided, though I know it hears me at least, and takes what I say into account.”

“You told it I have your recommendation.”

“I did, and you most definitely do.”

Neville squidged up a bit at that, and leaned. Uncle Luke put his arm around him and squeezed firmly, settling back again and re-opening the book against his raised, be-jeaned knee. Neville got _that_ one too, loud and clear. It was time to change the subject. He  dug out his shoebox from under the pillows again, selected a chocolate frog (Special Holiday Edition: Peppermint Eggnog) and broke the seal neatly, catching  the escaping incumbent easily as he examined the card.

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

A soft knock sounded. At the same time, at the same moment, the piano stopped.  Neville looked up and over. Stella was standing there, watching him. She looked exhausted. Neville sat up.

"What is it?" he said anxiously. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve put the word out,” she said. “Why don’t you come down to the kitchen, and we’ll have a cup of tea? Only I don’t know about you, but I could really use one.”

“Is everything alright?” he asked.

“Tea first,” she said. “We’ve talked to the other Project Managers. There’s a lot to go over, and you’ll have a lot of questions with it, I know.”

He could have argued, but he didn’t, just swung his legs over the side of the sofa and followed her. As they passed the stairs, Potter descended, red-eyed and subdued and with his scrawny little hand tucked in Padre Tony’s. It was the first time Neville had seen him since the priest had carried him out of the kitchen; he hadn’t come up to the tower last night at all. Neville had only lasted an hour there himself before returning to his own room. Without the other boy there, the skittering and scuttling in the terrarium behind his head was not remotely conducive to a proper and comforting rest.

“Hey, Ace my man. How ya holdin’ up?” Padre Tony offered him in greeting, and followed up with a firm arm round the shoulders as they caught up with them. Neville pulled away immediately and offered him a rather austere and reserved Look in return. Potter looked alright, he thought - somewhat soothed, even - and he had obviously had a bath somewhere in the interim, and was wearing clean clothes - but as whatever comfort the priest provided the smaller boy could, considering that they were (hopefully) both scheduled to leave in two-to-five, only be temporary, he wasn’t inclined to encourage or develop a serious attachment there.

Never mind that the hours of reflection on the parlour sofa had served him up not only memories, but the self-reminder that the man before him, no matter how entertaining, charismatic, obviously well-meaning and recommended by Frankie, was at least nominally South American. As Neville was still waiting on his answer on just why he and his friends-and-relations hadn’t wanted his mother and father to recover, his willingness to accept anything there beyond jam donuts, lessons in colourful American colloquialisms, and the occasional mandated-if guaranteed-private conversation on Matters Concerning, was bound to be limited.

“Alright then?” he asked Potter instead.

“Yeah,” was all Potter said in return. “'M sorry I left you alone last night. I fell asleep on Padre Tony’s sofa.”

“No problem,” Neville said, and to the man in question (slightly less than politely), “Don’t call me Ace. Only Potter and Frankie can call me that. And I’m not your _man,_ any more than I’m a kid or a button.”

That earned him a quizzical, if unresentful look… Under the circumstances, Neville felt justified in ignoring it. Never mind all undue emotional attachment and unanswered questions, the man was a representative of _God._ The boy wasn’t quite prepared to call Him bollocks again, he thought, inasmuch as he did appreciate Him finally answering his prayers, but that being said…

He, and all of his proxy representatives - _in situ Christi_  or otherwise - were on formal _notice_ until he was guaranteed his trip home again.

The kitchen was, once again, filled: all of those who’d been present for Potter’s revelation once more returned. They all looked more than a bit uneasy. Neville, suddenly, did not find himself in the mood for uneasy. He settled on the indicated stool and cut directly to the ruthless chase.

“Well?” he said without preamble. “What’s going on, then?”

"Astra's come up with a plan," Al said after a moment. "A feasible plan. Two of them, actually, though they both start the same way.  It's just..." He ran his hands through his thick white hair. "They’re a bit... Radical, you see? From the certain perspective.”

"No. I don't see. Because you haven't told me what they are yet. Suppose we start there."

"They involve a few risks,” James said. “Not vital ones, not... They involve re-writing the parameters of the Project. In different ways. And. Erhm. Cutting it short."

"You mean collapsing the Gate? Only that’s not acceptable is it, I'd thought we'd determined? At least not till Potter and I are on the other side?”

"No," Lily said. "It isn’t, and we can't collapse it anyway. Closing it is one thing, collapsing another. We wouldn't be closing it either. I mean, alright, that sounds alright in theory, but when it comes down to it, that's not really advisable either. Only, there's Doorstop to be thinking on, isn't there? He's still in the middle of things, and closing up shop early there could have..." She paused. "Repercussions."

"What kind of repercussions?" Neville probed.

"We're not sure," she admitted. "That's the problem. Blowing up the multiverse is one thing. Risking the integrity of someone's soul... That's a whole different realm of personal responsibility."

“Oh, we're worrying about personal responsibility now?"

"So say we all," Padre Tony muttered.

"Not helping, Toninho," his mother said from her seat at the end of the table. "We were right, and they were wrong. Demonstrably wrong. You may celebrate our spiritual victory later."

"Winning that argument isn't exactly something to write home about, Ma, you know?"

"So what's the plan?" Neville probed again. "Since going through would shut things down? It would, wouldn’t it?"

“Yes,” Astra said. “It would. And there’s a way around it; there _is,_ but it’s a bit…” She paused again.  “Problematic.”

“In what way?”

“We know that Uncle Harry and Gramps arrived,” the Master Arithmancer explained, “because both you and Potter are here, and you wouldn’t be if your counterparts hadn’t successfully crossed as well. And you told us, Longbottom, that you read the article in the Prophet that confirmed that Sirius Black was released from Azkaban. That means that Uncle Harry survived the first crucial night. What we don’t know is how he survived it, and what state he’s in now. Where he is now. There are two possibilities; either he arrived, realized immediately what happened, and has realized from the get-go he hasn't gone back in time after all, because the particular event never happened to him... Or we managed to get in contact with someone on our side to recover the situation before he arrived. And that's not just improbable, it's impossible, at least as we're all yet positioned here, so..”

"So..."

She pressed her fingers to her temple and closed her eyes. Neville could practically see her mind tilting and whirling.

“There are three options,” she said finally. “Three possible courses of action. Three paths we could take here - and yes, we have, in fact, noted the parallels there from the three paths in the mother’s vision of the Traveler from the First Prophecy again, that you brought over with you. In the first, we maintain the status quo, and wait for the notification from the other side that Riddle is dead before continuing on we originally planned.”

“But that notification might not ever come now!” Neville protested.

“That’s something we’re taking into consideration, yes. The second and third scenarios both involve cutting the Project short in order to re-establish the appropriate order of events. We can’t contact anyone there from this end to do that, though, obviously, so again, we’d have to do it ourselves. In the second of the three scenarios, therefore, we’d send you and Potter back from the very first point we can - March 20th, the day that you leaped, Longbottom - get you to Severus Snape, and have you tell him to nick a time-turner from the Ministry so that he can go back to check on Uncle Harry at the moment he arrived there, three and a half months ago. Once done, he could accommodate for the details by whatever means necessary, and it would be game on from thereon in, as per the original plan.”

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**January, 1990**

"Mirabella Plunkett," Neville read. "’Born in 1839, Mirabella Plunkett famously fell in love with a merman in Loch Lomond while on holiday. When her parents forbade her to marry him, she transfigured herself into a haddock and was never seen again.’"

"Ah." Uncle Luke craned his neck. "Oh dear. That _is_ unfortunate. Then again, if my Animagus form was a haddock, I might be embarrassed to show my face again too." He examined his own card, from his selected treat (Special Holiday Edition: Gingerbread Souffle). "Ignatia Wildsmith."

"Ooh, I've got her!” Neville craned in turn. “She's the one who invented floo-powder as an alternative to Apparition!”

"I shall frame her, then, and put her in the place of honour on my mantel. As one of those unfortunates with the aversion there, I feel qualified in saying that that she truly has made the world a better place." He let his frog onto the mattress and watched it hop about a bit till the charm wore off. It landed, quite conveniently, on Neville’s knee. He retrieved it, and offered it forth, stuffing himself comfortably back into the crook of the long arm again. Uncle Luke shook his head, smiling.

“Don’t you want it?” Neville asked. “I mean… Don’t you like them?”

‘It is not a question of like or dislike. It a question of associative context.” He retrieved his wand, and slashed down. _“Expecto Patronum!”_

And a small silvery frog bounced under and around the blankets, joyously and enthusiastically.

“You’re protected by a chocolate frog?” Neville said in dubious delight. “Only… _Really?”_

Uncle Luke laughed. “No,” he said. “It is a poison dart frog.”

“I’ve never heard of them before.”

“It is not surprising. They are native to the jungles of South America.”

“Mm.” Neville bit off a double mouthful of chocolate. Gingerbread Souffle and Peppermint Eggnog, he thought, went _very_ well together. “Poison… Jungle… I reckon you felt like you were in a jungle a lot, during the war. The poison’s self-explanatory there… Why South America?”

There was a pause.

“As you may know, I went to Castelobruxo School,” Uncle Luke said. “In Brazil, on my ISEP year. I had a friend then. This was his Animagus form.”

“Had? You don’t know him now?  I mean... Anymore? To write letters or anything?”

“No,” Uncle Luke said.  He held out his hand. The frog leaped in promptly. “There was an accident. I was very nearly killed. He threw himself in front of me, at the last moment, and was killed instead.”

Neville’s mouth opened in an O. He twisted in the crook of his arm and stared up at him, his round little face unguarded in its unnaturally adult pity and sympathy. Uncle Luke didn’t look at him.

“So this way… He’s with you always?” he ventured. “Because he protected you, and Patronuses are your protectors?

“Yes. Though it was not a one-time event. He protects me yet, in all ways, because he did offer his life for mine. It was his sacrifice that sustains me, you see, and the memory of how much he loved me, that protects me, and has always protected me, against the darkness. As long as I remember him… And truthfully I think, even if I were to forget… He stands between me and the shadows.”

“Do you think that I’ll ever have a friend like that?” the boy said wistfully. Uncle Luke looked down at him at that.

“You have two, at least, already, Master Longbottom,” he said gently. “You may only see them every other Sunday from two to four, but you carry them with you always, I know, in your heart, as I carry my friend.”

Neville was silent, fiddling with the edge of the card, his thoughts on _that_ observation clearly written on his round little face - that it wasn’t the same thing at all.  Uncle Luke kissed his head.

“I will ask my friend send you one,” he promised. “Wherever he is now, to stand with you always as such a one would -  even unto the end of the world.”

“What was his name?” He caught the immediately closed, reserved look at that. “I’m sorry. Only… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It is alright,” Uncle Luke said, recovering himself. “His name was - is - Ramone.”

“Ramone,” Neville repeated experimentally. “That’s a nice name.”

“I have always thought so.”

“Did he like chocolate?”

That earned him a genuine chuckle. “Yes. He utterly adored it. I used to tease him that that is why he was so brown; he ate so much of it, whenever possible, that it showed on his skin. Only as a man, though. In frog form, he was blue.”

“Really?”

“Mm. The colour of joy. He was a tremendous speed-racer, and was never so happy when he was on a broom. And when he was happy… His joy burned as hot as the blue heart of flame, like the sky on the utmost edge of Heaven.”

“I like that,” Neville decided. “It would make a good poem.” He stuffed himself comfortably back into the crook of the long arm again, and bit the head off of his chocolate frog. The shimmering silvery equivalent winced, disappearing under the blankets again.

“You still haven’t answered my first question,” he noted as he polished off the last mixed mouthful. Uncle Luke handed him a magically dampened handkerchief prudently before giving over, taking it back and taking care of his chocolatey face and fingers himself.

“Which question was that again?” he asked, spelling the handkerchief clean, folding it, and setting it neatly aside on the night table.

“How do you manage women.”

“Ah. That question.”

“Begin at the beginning?” Neville offered. “Go to  till you come to the end; then stop?”

“Mm. No. I am afraid that that maxim is not applicable to the particular series of lessons, Master Longbottom.”

“Why’s that?”

“There is no end, for one,” his godfather said dryly. “And no stopping. If you do that, once you’ve begun, they will catch up with you.”

“The lessons?”

“No. The women.”

“And then you’d be back at the beginning again?”

“Presupposing you survive the fall-out of your initial endeavors, yes. As per the specifics... I am afraid, Master Longbottom, that a great deal of that does depend on the particular woman and your relationship to her.”

“Oh. And the rest?”

“There are patterns and predictors that one may apply to the species in general, though, of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Approach is something else again. That must be individualized, as one must recognizes that women - all peoples in fact - are yet individuals. Research, therefore, is an imperative. Subtlety is even more of one.”

“Examples?”

Uncle Luke stretched out his long legs again and adjusted the pillows behind his back as he considered that.

‘It is best to think in comparative terms there,” he said. “Against the context that you know. Let us begin with this, then: what motivates men?’

“I don’t know,” Neville said honestly. “I’m not a man yet.” His godfather chuckled.

“There is that. Well, my own observations there are reasonably straightforward - we enjoy cultivating the self-delusion that we are in charge of our lives, or, at the very least, and as that never goes quite as well in any given moment as we’d like, that we will have control over the future. In the given moment, though, in those moments where things never do go as well as we would like, a good meal,  sympathetic friends, a pocketful of galleons and an appropriately solicitous woman do help make the disappointment bearable.”

“And women don’t want those things?”

“Many do,” he said. “Yes. It is a matter of priority. On that theme of generalities again, the world as it is is not inclined, nor ever has been, to favour the idea, much less the actuality, of independent, self-sufficient women. An independent, self-sufficient woman, after all, may be seen as a threat to the fourth of a man’s essential identified comforters in the difficult moment  - a solicitous partner. As a result, and as they are at the chronic disadvantage, women have evolved to value security. That sounds simple enough, again, but only again, if one is a man. For women… It is not nearly, nearly as simple as it sounds. Every woman has her own context again, and security means different things to each. Always though, it leads back to that which supports the one determining qualifier - that which will validate them as intelligent, strong, respected, and yes, loved beings in their own and quite sufficient right, no comparatives necessary or desired.”

“That’s a human thing, though,” Neville pointed out.

“It is,” Uncle Luke agreed. “And thus, success there will always serve to remind men of the truth that women are human.”

“That they’re… " He wrinkled his nose. _"Human?_ What else would they be?”

“More-than,” Uncle Luke said dryly. “That is, for the record, typically pronounced ‘inferior’ in Disgruntled, Insecure Manspeak.”

“That’s stupid,” he pronounced decisively. “And what does it all have to do with the sofa you talked about in the message?”

“Ah. Well, that is another issue altogether. Men and women both enjoy being appreciated. Most men think that it’s a bit of a waste of time to constantly relay the specifics of their appreciation there. It is not. The rewards for making the effort to communicate on that level are quite consistently gratifying, particularly when those efforts are phrased in an eloquent, poetic fashion. The world, Master Longbottom, is filled with men with a dearth of poetry in their souls, and, conversely, overflows with women who desire a partner with the gift. Most of us, then, must find a reliable facilitator.”

“Like the books of poetry?’”

“Like the books of poetry.”

“And the sofa?”

“The sofa is a metaphor,” he explained. “Translated, I was telling your father that if he wished your mother to make him a hot meal, and to tolerate his bloking it up with his mates after hours,  and to provide him with the extra five galleons from the household budget for beer and curry with those mates without complaining on it, and, of course, to offer him his preferred version of practical conjugal sympathy a bit more often, he needed to learn to show his appreciation and understanding of her position and yes, her worth, a bit more openly, reliably, and poetically.”

“Practical conjugal _sympathy?”_ Neville wrinkled his nose at him again. “What’s _that?”_

“Heinlein,” Uncle Luke advised. "Though you may wish to keep in mind that his generalized approach and attitude on the specifics there, never mind his conclusions on the ultimate value  and function of women again, are, for the most part, completely contraindicated, and in real life would not win him much sympathy at all. Of any kind.”

“Okay,” Neville said obligingly.  He tucked his feet up. “Uncle Luke?”

“Mm?”

“I know you're an Animagus and a natural Occlumens and all...  But there's more to it than that. There has to be. Had to be. How _did_ you manage Riddle for ten years?”

 

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

"Erhm," Neville said blankly. "Only... What? _What?"_

“All inane blithering starry-eyed idiocy aside,” Astra said. “The Plonker Pack's secret mission to send Charlie over has actually provided us with an opportunity that we wouldn’t otherwise have. Just as the Gate is still open, the side doors - one on each side of the Gate, as they too had to balance - are still there. Runic memories of themselves, and yes, closed now, but still fully functional, and it would be easy enough to re-activate them. All we’d need is enough power, and with a bit of wiggling of the original vectors, not by the Horntails again, but with a quick, outward-focused burst of magic from the runic fences that define the perimeter of the Gate, we could reboot them and send you boys across again, one on each side, without triggering the issues that would otherwise arise.”

“Oh. So… You’re saying that you’d be sending us down the bannisters instead of down the staircase? Analogically speaking?”

“Exactly.”

“And once we get there? Not to play devil’s advocate, only time turners are a bit of a dodgy prospect, aren’t they?” her not-grandfather said dubiously. “I mean, all issues of legality, ethical responsibility and respect for established history and closed temporal loops aside, which they aren’t, I asked Gran about them once, on using one to go back to help Mum and Dad, and she said that it’s taking your own life in your hands to go back more than a few hours at a time. ‘The center cannot hold’ like Yeats said, and three and a half months is a lot more than the recommended five-to-seven hours.”

“Professor Snape is well aware of the risks,” Astra reassured him. “And learning to adapt  the twentieth century versions to the variants we’ve got going on here now were part of his particular training, so that he would be able to act in instances of unanticipated vital Project-related catastrophes. This definitely counts as one of those, so as long as he can get access to one, he’d have no problems working it up to the safer standards,  and there should be loads of them there yet; they didn’t all get destroyed there till 1996 here, in the attack at the Department of Mysteries.”

“But if we go back before the pre-arranged and projected parameters we’ve already set, won't everyone else who went through from this side be stuck there? Permanently? Because there won't be anybody left on this side to cross over when it's time when they try it, because everything needs to be balanced again?"

“It doesn't quite work like that. Also, even if it did, all of the other souls involved were adults. We all know which option they'd choose if it came down to it. As it is now, it could very well be that we don't do this, don't do _something_... We’ll create a paradox. And as we're working with the multiverse here, that could, again, mean not just the end of your world again, but all of them."

“And it could mean the same thing if we do do it,” he pointed out, in spite of himself. “Salvation or ruin - we could save everything, or blow it up by acting prematurely.”

"That’s a ‘might be catastrophic’ as opposed to, based on what we know is waiting for Uncle Harry again - and that’s only before he ever leaves the cupboard - ‘ _will_ bollocks everything up right from the first second in.’”

"Why can’t you just send us back to a point before Professor Snape gets there?" Neville wanted to know. “So we can contact him before all this happens, and we don't have to mess with time turners at all?.”

"The temporal parameters are set,” James explained. “Can't be changed. You have to go back- or rather arrive back - on the date you left, Longbottom, but right after you leaped, because there can’t be two co-existent versions of you from that same side existing on the same side at the same time. Having two opposed-world counterparts of you at two different ages existing on the same side at the same time is one thing - your souls match, but there are just enough differences in your physical cores to make the safe difference, especially since you’re still flexible with it - but again, the timeline wouldn’t be able to  sustain two of the same-side version of either you or Potter for more than a few hours before you’d both start sustaining inevitably fatal injuries."

"And what would happen to us one we're there and have fixed everything? We're nine! We can't just live by ourselves!"

"Snape would take care of you," Scorpius reassured him. "He'd keep you safe, till it's time for you to re-enter the scheduled picture." He caught the cross-eyed looks shot at him from all directions at that. “Oh, come on. He’s not as bad as all _that._ I did meet him once. When he was alive, even, and alright, he was a bit grouchy, but that was at least partially situational in that he was one of the last three Resistance members alive after Riddle’s takeover, and was facing the prospect of sacrificing his soul to the Dementors to repair the integrity of the timeline besides.”

“Dementors don’t take your soul,” Neville couldn’t help but say. They all looked at him, startled. “What? Souls are inviolate in essence, and aren’t separated from the body till the moment of death. And you don’t die with Dementors, so your soul’s still there. _That_ means that all they can take is your active and conscious sanity, through the temporary external ley path between them and you, set up by their magic so that they can suck all the positively charging chemicals out of your brain. When they take enough of them, that is to say, all of them, and the negatively charging ones too, through the Kiss, they use them all to make baby Dementors. Only they’re not really babies. They’re shadows, formed from that which fuels your memories and all your experiences, but it’s all a lie, really. Your memories and experiences aren’t you. That’s your soul again, and _that_ can only be taken if you give it away. Deliberately, and with conscious thought and intent. And if your sanity’s being sucked out of you, you’re not in any sound condition to be offering it up, are you?”

“I shouldn’t ask,” Padre Tony said after a moment. “I must. Where the fuck did all _that_ come from?”

“Uncle Luke,” Neville said shortly, without looking at him. “We were discussing things. Lots of different things, as per Personal Related Subjects, and it came up. He explained it all to me.”

“Personal Subjects? You are saying that you _know_ someone who’s been Kissed, _Senhor_ Longbottom?” Carlotta Hernandez de Silva asked. “Personally again?”

“Yes, of course. Barty Crouch Junior and the Lestrange brothers?” he elaborated at the renewed blank expressions. “During the internal breach at Azkaban back in 1982, that let the Dementors in to take out their wing, and the other Death Eaters who were there?”

_“What?”_

“What do you mean, what? That’s not a difference. I told Big Nev they were still alive, but it didn’t matter, that only Bellatrix was still an issue there, and he didn’t say a thing.”

There was a deep silence. Frankie pressed his fingers to his eyes.

“It’s a difference,” he said. “It’s a big difference, Ace. Who were the other Death Eaters who were Kissed, do you remember?”

“Alecto and Amycus Carrow,” he said promptly. “And somebody named Rookwood. Augustus Rookwood. They’re all still locked up,” he added. “Except for Crouch Junior. His parents took him out after it happened, and put him in a private facility. The rest didn’t have family willing to sponsor their care outside the prison. So the government just keeps them there.”

“Shit,” Al said succinctly, and buried his face in his hands. “We are so, _so_ screwed.”

“One thing at a time, Albus.” Scorpius rubbed his shoulder. “If we can pull this off, we can fix it. All we’d have to do is get to Uncle Harry and Uncle Nev and put dissuasion charms on them, so they don’t feel inclined to go poking on, or absorb details related to, the particular subject matter. We’d have to do it anyway, on any number of things, probably. We’ll have Longbottom make a list. As for Snape…  Pretty sure that, however parentally uninclined, he’d be alright with taking care of a pair of nine-year-olds for a bit in order to ensure the integrity of the multiverse.”

"Lily will be there," Pollux offered. “We could send them to her.”

"Lily can't know, Pol," Astra said. "Uncle Harry's her son. She's doing this all for him. If she knew what the Dursleys are like there, she'd never in a thousand years be able to stay away from him. And we're trying to _stabilize_ the plot point here, not bring her barging in!”

“Alright.” James Potter collected himself again. “This isn’t a set-back, people. It’s just more factors to account for, and more conclusive evidence that sitting on our collective arses here isn’t an option. One way or the other… We _will_ resolve it all.”

“You said there were three options to be going on with,” Neville said. “What’s the last one, then?’

“Ah,” he said. “Right. That one’s a bit more involved, and…” He caught sight of the small, till now silent figure sitting opposite him. “Alright then, Harry?”

Potter said nothing. He didn’t even appear to hear. He was staring down at the tabletop, dappled green again in the rain-light from the window, not clutching at his hair, but with his arms folded across his thin little chest as he worried at a thumbnail.

 _“Senhor_ Potter?’ Carlotta Hernandez de Silva said gently. “Would you care to tell us what you’re thinking?” Potter shook himself at that, and sat up.

“You can’t send us through, or even around, on our own,” he pronounced. “I mean… You could; you can, and we’d get there alright, prolly anyway, but the odds of the Gate noticing what’s happening in the middle of things are fifty-fifty there at best. In order to maximize the possibility of success, then - success in terms of not risking collapse or closure again - you’ll have to send the same number of people around as you did through the first time. That way, the Gate wouldn’t pick up on the imbalances, and will think that what’s happening is just an externalized echo of the event that happened on the original starting date.”

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**January, 1990**

Uncle Luke leaned his head back.

"If you are to understand that," he said finally. "You must first understand, as you would with those individual women again, what motivates the man himself. What do you know about him, exactly?"

“He's evil,” his godson said promptly.

“Aside from.”

“Not a lot," Neville admitted.  “Just his name, and that he's from an old family, the Gaunts, and is supposed to be descended from Salazar Slytherin. And that he petitioned Black for Solace through the Lestranges so that could unite the three Houses, and Malfoy too by marital association, through money and politics so he'd have enough money and political power to take over everything. That's all the history books say, really. Well. The history books I’m allowed to read, anyway. Gran took all the good ones out of the library and put them away till I’m older.”

“Mm. That is a fairly concise essential summary. That being said, the details do make the story, and there are quite a few of those to be going on with that you will not find in any book. I am not talking on details that your grandmother would prefer I not impart,” he added. “Simply the ones that, when it comes down to it, define again, and explain, the man. He did start out as one, after all, no matter his eventual renunciation of his own humanity.”

“Uh?’

“Very few people are actually born evil. Riddle is no exception, though one way  or the other, he did have quite a bit of help to be going on with in terms of a facilitating environment. He had an extremely painful and unfortunate childhood,” Uncle Luke translated. “That stunted him on the most crucial developmental levels.”

"You’re saying that you reckon there was something when he was young that happened to him, that made him go wrong?" Neville asked. "Wrong enough so to make him want to change himself so that he wouldn’t ever be at risk again?”

Uncle Luke rearranged his pillows a bit more comfortably as he thought on that.

"I do not know that there was a singular event,” he said finally. “Though that does not mean one did not occur. What I do know is that he was born of ra…” He caught himself. “A completely loveless and resentful union, and was orphaned and abandoned at birth. After that… He grew up the neglected victim of extreme mental, psychological and physical violence, in abject, hopeless  poverty, and utterly dependent on the negligible charity and non-existent good will of others. Too, he lived in the chronic active battle-zone that was London at the height of Grindelwald's war. Grindelwald left Great Britain alone for the most part, but the Muggles were in the middle of their own quite spectacular endeavour there, and no one, Magicals or not, was excused or exempt from the localized fall-out.”

“That’s _horrid!”_ Neville’s expression was appalled.

“It is,” Uncle Luke agreed. “Though it might be noted that there are many others who were, and have been raised, if you can call it that, in quite identical circumstances - worse ones, even - who have yet managed to survive morally intact. Riddle’s environment though, matched the inherited inclinations of his psyche. I believe, from what I know of his family, that the tradition there - on both sides - would have been to obsess over even the slightest of personal misfortunes regardless of circumstance.”

“You mean he was - is - a whinger?”

Uncle Luke’s lips tilted wryly. “That is one way of putting it,” he said. “A very polite and understated way. But that being said, his suffering was very real, and quite overwhelming, I am sure, and as he had no control over any of it - no possible way to improve his lot in life, at that age - he quickly grew resentful and hateful of everyone around him, and eventually arrived at the logical conclusion that if he were to gain enough power and control to minimize his pain, he would first have to attain absolute power and control over everything and everyone around him. Inevitably, perhaps, considering that he felt that the entire world was against him,  his ambition there would grow to encompass the world.”

“What’s he afraid of? And what’s he got against Muggles?”

“Ah. Well, on the second point first… He was raised amid Muggles. They were, and are, in his eyes, the collective driving force behind his misery and misfortune. When he came to Hogwarts and started doing research on his background, he realized that his father had been one - the father whom he sought out in his vicious and consuming need for validation, only to confirm that he was, indeed, one of the despised oppressors. He had thought his mother the Nomaj first, you see? His mother who had died, and left him in the care of her own worthless ilk. It made logical sense to him. In the end, her only saving grace in his eyes was that she was of the direct line of Salazar Slytherin - a man who had had his own prejudices against the Non-Magicals. Perverse circumstance engendered and bred confirming perversity; Slytherin was equivalent Magical European royalty, with particular gifts that the particular descendant just happened to share, making his claims of genetic association there inarguable.”

“What kind of gifts?”

“He was a Parselmouth - he could speak to snakes. Once that was established, he declared himself Slytherin’s Heir, and offered him the opportunity to claim the father, or at least the ancestor, that he had always dreamed on. That ancestor’s prejudices, naturally, became his, inherited along with the Serpentine Crown - and he already had more than enough of his own prejudice along the lines to go along with, that too, confirmed in his own mind, that he was destined for equivalent, and even greater, greatness.”

“How do you _know_ all this?” Neville asked, fascinated. “It can’t all be from lurking around and listening in corner webs, can it?”

Lucius Malfoy laughed softly.

“No,” he said. “But I had a certain advantage there, you see? I was engaged to Narcissa Black, sister of Bellatrix Black, and as he was seeking, past the point, Solace with the Black family, they demanded full disclosure. Make no mistake on it, and they would never, ever admit it - the major reason that they considered the option was that, no matter his impeccable Magical heritage and vast Magical ability, Riddle has Non-Magical blood. The Blacks had, simply, written themselves into the biological corner with their inbreeding. Walburga and Orion Black were both insane, and considering that they are first cousins, their sons have escaped their fate by what can only be described as a genetic miracle.  Cygnus Black, Narcissa’s father, was an intellectual dolt who married Druella Rosier because she was literally his only option; she was the only Pureblooded woman of her generation whose family who had not crossed with the Blacks in fewer than six consecutive generations. Everyone, _everyone,_ was well aware that if pattern followed pattern, and the five Black heirs - any of them - married Pureblooded men and women, the likelihood there was that every single one of their offspring would be Squibs.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I was considered an acceptable match for Narcissa because we Malfoys have always been very careful to infuse our lines regularly. We do not advertise it, but the results are clear; as clear as they most certainly would not be had we limited ourselves. Andromeda married a Muggleborn, of course, and was excised from the family tree for it, but if she had been willing to follow and promote the proposed line - that her husband was actually descended from a latent Magical line - it could have been managed. She was not willing, primarily, though certainly not exclusively, because they were so rude and crude with it. As it turns out…” His lips tilted. “Druella and Cygnus lived to regret their less than tactful approach. Their filthy half-blood of a granddaughter, Nymphadora, is not only spectacularly magically strong, but a Metamorphmagus. In certain circles, that talent holds just as much prestige as does being a Parselmouth. In what they would have deemed the appropriately discreet circumstances… She would have been the most sought-after bride on the continent, and they could have taken all the credit.”

“So why did the Lestranges agree to Solace?”

“Aside from the prestige inherent in binding themselves to the line of Salazar Slytherin again, and their pragmatic ability to smell which way the wind was blowing in the political sense? They are almost as badly off as the Blacks, genetically speaking. By affiancing Bellatrix to Rodolphus, the family Heir, and participating in the agreement with Gaunt, Riddle’s family, they got Muggle-infused children, legitimate ones, to carry on their family name and to invigorate future generations without having to take the direct social hit for marrying one of their own off to the half-blood themselves.”

“It all seems very complicated,” Neville said dubiously. “And stupid.”

“Mm,” Uncle Luke agreed. “Still. In terms of his fears... As Riddle believed in his formative years that he was nothing - as he, a penniless, orphaned child was constantly told he _was_ nothing, and as his physical environment and personal circumstances reinforced that dictated state so thoroughly - he quite naturally feared being reduced, again by circumstances beyond his control, past the point of no return. To the point of nothingness.  He had no control over his environment, so he was driven by the need to seek it out… To gain control over absolutely everything, by whatever means necessary. And quite early on.. he found that he had abilities that might actually allow him to fulfil his ambitions there. He was a Magical, the only Magical in existence as far as he knew, with power that no one else in his world had, and as he had no belief in God - in anything beyond himself, really, since he had never been able to trust anyone but himself - it made him God. Not inhuman, but superhuman. When he entered the Magical world though… He discovered the truth. He was not unique. He was not the only one with the powers that made him feel omnipotent. He wasn’t God after all;  he was human, a human whose Magical mother had died, and that meant he was not invulnerable after all. However powerful he was, Magical or no, he was still subject to the one thing that makes equals of us all in the end - man, woman, Magical, Nomaj, rich or poor, fortunate or not… Death. And he resented it, and hated it, and was affronted by it. He thought he deserved better. He thought he was better. He was literally _offended_ that he was not, after all, exempt from mortality, at the implied insinuation that he was no better than anyone else, that however he managed to accommodate and twist the world in his image during his lifetime, it could not last. That there must, inevitably, be an end to him, and and that everything he worked for, everything that he believed he deserved… Must eventually count for nothing. That he was destined, as he had been told from his beginning, to be lost, erased, and forgotten.”

“But he was evil right? Is evil? Inside?”

“Oh yes,” Lucius said grimly. “Oh yes. However vilely abused he may have been, however genetically predisposed he was to the types of mental illness that permeate certain families and manifest as functional, cunning insanity,  he yet had to make - _voluntarily_ make, and the alternative options were there; they are always, _always_ there - the kind of moment-by-moment choices that, in the end, defined and became him. His experiments with Dark magic were all deliberate, methodical and purposeful, undertaken with his one driving ambition in mind - power and control over his environment through established immortality.”

"That's really sad." Neville sat up, winding his arms around his knees tightly.

"Do you think so?”

"Yes. He was afraid of being lost in the dark. And he’s buried himself in it, hasn’t he? He’s buried himself in the thing he's afraid of most, and now he can't see his way out. Or even see the other options that are always there, or even what he really wants any more - to stop his pain - because you can't see in the dark.  And there can't be anything but pain there for him because he's made the thing he hates the most into the thing he holds closest, not because he's afraid of losing it, but because he's afraid if he lets go, it will catch him first." He fidgeted, tugging at the cuffs of his pajama trousers. "D'you think it's really too late for him? I mean… D’you really think there’s no hope there?”

Uncle Luke turned his head and regarded the round, pensive little face. He knew exactly where the question was really coming from, and who it was referencing, for that matter... His heart hurt.

"I do not know," he said quietly. "There are those who have counseled me to leave that to God, but I yet have wondered that myself, now and again, Master Longbottom - not because I have ever seen any signs of remorse or repentance there, but because it does not seem quite right to me, however lost he is, that someone should not hold out hope on his behalf. We give up on our own humanity when we give up on each other, you see? I cannot help but think that if there is a God, He takes such things into account when He is managing His miracles - that, in these instances - instances that do demand miracles - the fact that there is even one person who remembers the damned not as they were, or are, but as they might have been if things beyond their control had been just a little different… Makes a difference to Him.”

“More of a difference than the things that weren’t beyond their control?”

“On His part, perhaps. On ours… There are, no matter our private hopes again, pragmatics to take into account. Riddle’s soul is not actually our jurisdiction, and given the costs of his moment-by-moment indulgences in mortal insanity, we cannot afford to pretend that we are God. We have what we have to deal with in this moment, and the cost of waiting on such a creature’s redemption is simply unacceptable. It must in the end, be between him and His Maker, and as that is where it would ultimately be anyway, it behooves us to do the needed job as it is presented us, and work toward the Acceptable with it, in small things as well as the large, and trust that there is - that there will be - meaning and logic to it all."

"That doesn't sound very strategic."

"No, but it is the only way to manage it, if we are to save our own souls."

"How do you mean?'

"If we set a goal," Uncle Luke explained. "It is _our_ goal. On the level we are talking... In setting that goal, we seek to define the future in our own image. It is almost inevitable that our visions, therefore, for what the world calls the Greater Good, must become  exercises in pride and arrogance, born of pride and arrogance, and that we will, ourselves, become but other versions of the shadows that we claim to seek to defeat as the result. Shadows take the form of those around them, you see? They adapt to circumstance, and to those who cast them."

"You talked about God. Do you believe in Him, then?' he asked curiously.

"You quoted C.S. Lewis. Have you read his Narnia books?"

"Yes. They're in trunk number four."

"Mm. Well, I believe in Narnia," Uncle Luke said. "I live as a Narnian, whether it exists or not. Because it can only be better than this, and I know, on that level of instinct that Lewis discussed again. that there is something better than this. Brighter. Just because I do not see it, does not mean that it is not there. And conversely again... That which we see, is never all that there is. I wish to go there one day, if it does exist, so I live as I believe that those who go there should. And pride and arrogance will not bring you there. As the only thing we have to work with is the moment that we live in, I seek to make those moments exercises in the Acceptable, to use them in service to the Acceptable end, so that in the end if there truly is an Aslan... He will find me Acceptable."

"Do you think Aslan would think that giving Bellatrix what she gave my parents was Acceptable?”

"Quite likely not,” Uncle Luke admitted. “And as I likely offended Him with it... I am sorry that He is offended. I repent of offending Him. I am yet not one bit sorry, though, that I did the deed that offended Him.  I never will be. He understands that, I am sure, and why, on levels that I cannot even begin to imagine. Someone I met once told me that He will doubtless take that understanding of me into account at my final reckoning.'

"The Archbishop says that God already finds us Acceptable," Neville observed. "And that that's why Jesus, or Aslan I reckon, by the analogy, came. To show us that. And the rest is just recognizing that if there are things that you are and that you do that are Acceptable, there are probably things in you that are the opposite. He said that sometimes it's really hard to tell the difference though, because it’s hard to maintain objectivity on your own motives, like you just said about giving it to Bellatrix, never mind that sometimes you really don't want to know if there is a difference, because then you’d be putting yourself in a position to have to make decisions on your active behaviour that might be what you want, but that you know on the gut level probably isn’t what Jesus has in mind. That’s when you go look up Someone who's qualified to tell you what the difference is, before you make up your mind what you’re going to do.”

"He sounds like a very wise man."

"He goes on a lot," he said. "You just have to listen for the good bits in the middle of all the extra words."

The deep chuckle sounded again. "A fine summation of how to effectively communicate during war, especially when bookstores are involved. They are full of extra words."

And with that, he ruffled his hair and pulled the boy in firmly, settling him against his long, hard body. It felt odd, but he _did_ smell really good, Neville thought… He sniffed in pleasure, trying to be discreet with it.

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

Neville blinked. Astra looked insufferably pleased. “That’s exactly right,” she said approvingly to Potter. _“Exactly_ right. Caveats?”

“Uh?”

“Extra bits of specially relevant note, or conditions of necessary exception.”

“Oh.” Potter considered. “Well, it’s a one way trip again, so… They can’t ever come back. And they’d have to be people without counterparts on the other side, so there’d be no conflict of identical souls again.”

Neville half-rose, then sat down. Hard.

“Six more people,” he said. “Besides us?”

“Yes.” Potter said. “Live people, not dead ones, because if you write in the extra magics to give them bodies once they reach the other side, the Gate would notice again. So you have to send them through intact. Like we were sent through, so there’s not too much strain on the already placed vectors.”

“Bang goes you,” Astra said, pleased again, and hastily.. “Not literally. That would get really messy, and we’re trying to avoiding that. What we’d do is pitch all eight through together at the same time, and the magics will sort out the arrival dates just as they did in the original design. The first pair coming back on this Summer Solstice, the second at the Autumn Equinox, the third set, on the same day you left, Potter, and got here - December the 20th - and finally, you and Longbottom within the sixty second time-frame after Longbottom took the original jump, last month. Presupposing that all goes well, you wouldn’t have to contact Snape at all, or get a time-turner involved either.  The people who go through with you and arrive before you would check in and take care of everything before you ever got there.”

“Six people,” Neville repeated yet again. “Six _live_ people… On a one-way trip. Is that where the problematic comes in again, then? In finding people who would be willing to go?”

The adults looked at each other.

“No,” Frankie said. “No, that’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?” he said, bewildered. “You have the solution, you have the volunteers, you have the means… You won’t even have to shut the Project down at all, really, because the Gate will stay open till it shuts at the proper time! And me and Potter will get home!”

“There’s a limited window of opportunity there, Ace,” Frankie said. ‘In order for the Gate to recognize those who pass around it as an echo of an already established event rather than an alarming new actuality, we’d have to send you back within one year of the initial arrival date of the first of our original volunteers - Severus Snape. The runic memory of the prompting power blast only lasts as long as the first year comes round again. If we wait longer than that… It won’t work. You’ll be spotted, and we’re risking dimensional panic and collapse again, no matter the option we employ. And he arrived on the Summer Solstice on your world, going on ten months ago now. That leaves not quite eleven weeks to get everything prepped and ready to go.”

“Is _that_ a problem?”

“No,” Astra admitted. “Not if everyone cooperates. Or agreed to cooperate. The thing is, not everyone _is_ agreeing, and we don’t have a lot of time to convince them. If we don’t get started within the next week - and I’m not joking there; I mean that - we’ll run out of practical time to Get The Thing Done.”

“But Big Harry is in _trouble!_ He could _die!_ It could all go wrong if he realizes that he hasn’t gone back in time, and…” He actually shook with agitation.

“We _know_ that, Neville,” Stella said gently. “We do. But there are a lot of very frightened, and yes, very guilty people involved now. The majority of them, and when people are that frightened and guilty, they dig their heels in, see? They want to believe that if they just leave things be, like a lot of other people said that they should leave them be in the first place, that everything will just fix itself. Recalibrate, see? And Big Harry… And yes, Big Nev… They pulled this _off,_ Neville. They made it happen. It worked. They’re there, and you’re here. And now everyone here is thinking that if they can do that… What _can’t_ they do? What _can’t_ they manage?”

“BUT THEY DON’T _KNOW!_ THE WORLD COULD END, AND THEY DON’T KNOW! _HOW CAN THEY MANAGE ANYTHING IF THEY DON’T KNOW?”_

“No one is going to believe it till it actually happens, Longbottom,” James said bluntly. “It’s too much. It’s too _much._ And…"

He stopped. There followed a quite dreadful pause. The look of incredulous understanding dawning over the boy’s face was literally physically painful.

“They think I’m making it _up?”_ Longbottom said, outraged. “They think I’m making it all _up?_ The book, the differences… _Everything?”_

“It’s an easier thought than the alternative,” Bill Weasley said quietly. “To people who are already feeling as guilty as they are. Over everything. And you don’t come across as a kid, Longbottom, and well. You’ve talked quite a bit about wanting to write stories for a living, see? In front of people. Quite a number of people are thinking… Or saying, anyway, that maybe you’re practicing with it. Already. By testing it out here. On us.”

Neville struggled to collect himself. He failed quite entirely.

“Even if I did. Which I didn’t, but even if I did… What about Potter?” he demanded. “Do they think he made what _he_ said up? Doesn’t _that_ count for anything? Doesn’t _he_ count for anything, or Big Harry again?”

“Big Harry’s not here to speak for himself,” Stella said. “And as for Potter… This just proves to them all, in their minds, that keeping him here, safe, is the right thing to do. The only thing to do. And he’s got family here, you see?”

“He’s got family there too!” he roared, incensed. “It doesn’t matter where he is, he’s got family everywhere he goes now! He’s got _me!_ He doesn’t _need_ anybody else, because I’ve got family there, and he’s _mine_ , and my family _is_ his family!"

“You have your Gran,” Pollux said, even as Potter gave him a bit of an odd look at that. “I’m sorry, Longbottom. Your Gran, and your parents, and your Uncle Algie. In their minds... It’s not enough.”

“And Uncle _Luke,_ and Auntie _Niss!_ They count too; they do! They _love_ me, and they’ll take care of us, always, both of us! They will! I _know_ they will! It’s not even a _question!”_

“It is here,” Astra said softly. “I’m so sorry, Longbottom. I’m sure you do love them. That they’re exactly what you say they are. Who you say they are. But … We... Our world… Has our memories of their counterparts, you see? And here… They were not good people.”

Neville just knuckled his burning eyes. The rain rattled the window. His breathing was loud and harsh.

“So that’s it, then,” he said finally. “That’s all? We’re stuck here?”

“Not necessarily. There’s going to be a vote,” Al said. “Day after tomorrow. We’re not giving up, Neville. We’re _not. I’m_ not. This is… This is _Dad_. There’s no way… No _way…_ We’re just giving up.”

”A vote,” he repeated derisively. “A _vote?_ Do _we_ get a vote? Do we get a vote… On _any_ of it? Or are we just liars and babies and  bloody buggering bollocking _heroes_ in the story that _they’re_ all making up, after all? Heroes who don’t have a say in anything, ever, because Weasley there was right, and everybody _else_ always gets to decide how they live their lives after all?”

Not one of them said a word. He scrubbed at his eyes again.

“I was wrong,” he addressed them. “God isn’t bollocks at all. He did _His_ bit, after all. _You’re_ all bollocks. This whole _world_ is bollocks. And I hate you all. Every single _one_ of you.”

And with that, he hurled himself out of the kitchen and disappeared down the hall toward the parlour.

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**January, 1990**

**“** Summary?” Neville asked after he’d done with his admittedly self-indulgent olfactory moment. “Now that I know his details?’

“On…”

“How you managed Riddle.”

“Ah. Of course." Uncle Luke collected himself. “Short form: he had never in his life been able to trust anyone, or anything, to look out, not just for his interests, but for _him._ As his right hand man, therefore he valued in me, above all else, the fact that I was exactly as I presented myself - his unhesitating and uncompromisingly honest and competent, non-competing associate.  I never lied to him on the subject of my own strengths and weaknesses, you see, and never pretended to be something I was not. I was simply myself: that is, a man who understands and values the concept and actuality of efficiency, self control and the hierarchy, who has, and had, no desire to rise beyond my position, who loves his wife and country, who values loyalty and fidelity and family above all else… All of those things, he valued because they, and my transparency there, meant that he could trust me. There is nothing so important to a man in power, or seeking it, you see, be he good or evil - as a man that can be trusted. And as he did trust me, because I never lied to him, it meant that he was more inclined to listen to my advice, be it in the moment, or as pertained to the long term.”

“But…” His brow furrowed.”You did lie to him. All the time! Every moment of every day!”

“I know it sounds strange,” Uncle Luke said. “But we are talking on the strategic importance of character, not my political leanings. Truth be told, that last was never an issue because he never imagined that they were not the same as his. He wished them to be, you see? He wished me to think as he did. To be able to look over my shoulder at any given moment, when he saw me looking in a mirror, and to see his own face and values looking back at him. Encouraging him along that self-affirming line was actually quite a simple matter, involving, again, no active deception on my part at all.”

“No?” Neville looked skeptical, to say the least.

“No. In the end, he did the deceiving - the self-deceiving - himself. As he always perceived himself as first, all that I had to do was position myself behind him, in all reflected truth again as one who had no desire to stand beside or before him as his equal or better. And so, whenever he looked in the mirror again…There he would be: so entranced or enamoured with his own image that he never once _did_ see the truth - my truth -  only his own image and reflection again as he projected it over me.”

It was a good thing, Neville reflected, that he did have the perfect memory. His brain hurt more than a little trying to sort through all that in the given moment, and he suspected it would take more than a few reviews of the lesson there to absorb the finer particulars. “So he thought he was your Animagus form?” he asked.

“That is actually a very apt analogy. An interesting fact, only ninety percent of Animagi forms mimic one’s Patronus. In the other ten percent…  What you believe you see is not what is there at all. He found the nine in ten odds quite sufficient.”

“How do you think that works?” he asked, diverted.

"I am not sure. In my case… My first Patronus, my protector, was a stallion. A horse. Such a Patronus symbolizes freedom, and in my case, it was very apt. I felt my best protection then was freedom. But I was not free. I was the opposite. So what lay within was not which was demonstrated.”

“Your _first_ Patronus? They can change?”

“They can. In the meantime… Behind all of the advice I might give you on managing women, or people for that matter, Master Longbottom, there is this again. However paradoxical and impossible it sounds, if you ever are who you are, in _truth,_ no matter how you, or anyone else, arranges the apparent _facts_ so that they see, in you, only what they wish to see... You cannot fail.”

“I don't reckon Gran understands that. She always says that I’m not anything like Dad, but she keeps trying to arrange my facts so she sees him, and not me.”

“It is not surprising,” his godfather said gently. “She misses him terribly.”

“But I’m not _him._ ” It was a bit frustrated. “Am I? I mean, _am_ I like him? At all?”

“There are bits there,” he said. “He was quite extraordinarily focused and determined. And like all Longbottoms, he lived to Get The Thing Done."

“Uncle Algie’s a Longbottom, and he doesn’t.”

“I would not say that. One simply has to think on, there, of what exactly, he defines as The Thing.’

“Hot meals, a pocketful of galleons, bloking it up with his mates down the pub, and sympathy from everybody, not just women, just about sums it up there,” Neville said sourly. ‘He’s like Susan in Narnia. It’s all he thinks there is, and ignores the idea that anything could come After. I spose Gran’s his sympathetic woman. She provides his hot meals and galleons, after all, since she’s my legal proxy till I’m of age, and I’m Longbottom of Longbottom again.”

“And would you say that he is good, at least, at getting the Thing Done in that self-assigned context?”

“Yes, but that’s not in the proper spirit of the motto at all!”

“It is not, no, but there it is. A man who wishes to Get The Thing Done in the proper spirit of the motto will understand that everyone does have their own applied personal interpretation on the broader theme. Learn to work that - identify their motives and desires, whether on the individual or collective level -  and shove it down their throats till they choke on it, and they’ll be so grateful for your understanding that they will do exactly what you say. And they will thank you for the opportunity, to boot.”

“So… That’s it? Identify motives and desires and give them what they want so they’ll like you? What if it’s not good for them?”

“You do not have to actually provide them with that which is not good for them; they will seek it out with or without your help. That being the case… You, as a proponent of the Acceptable, must simply present and position yourself, in a manner allows them best, through their own inclination, to deceive themselves that your mere presence means that you are supportive of their interests. Truthfully and ideally, though, you are so positioned, so that in the crucial moment, when they must finally realize that what they see is not all that is there, there will be someone they respect and trust close by to help them understand the deeper specifics, and to lead the way Home.”

“But will they still trust _you?”_

“As they must see, upon reflection, that you have never pretended to be anything but what you are… They will, in spite of themselves.  If they have reached the point of understanding you, of being able to see you, and through you, what you represent, they will understand that you have never blinded them, but that they are, in truth, the ones who have closed their own eyes all along.”

He paused as Neville struggled with that, smiling a little as he watched the little face scrunch fiercely in concentration.

“So basically you’re saying that you have to make them understand that your way is what they wanted all along?”

“No. Not quite. Firstly, you are not _making_ them _do_ anything,” Uncle Luke said patiently. “You are simply remaining in  prudent proximity as you seek - extremely quietly - to minimize the sadly inevitable effects of their self-absorption, preferably without giving yourself away before Aslan arrives to make His presence known. You may, and must, of course, prevent those effects actively now and again, as you are able, but your long term agenda depends upon your patience in standing as a demonstrated and established example in that moment where all must out. Secondly, you must never forget that you are not seeking to model or incorporate _your_ way, but the _Acceptable_ way.  Aslan’s way. _Your_ way, after all, as we have already determined, is not and reliably _His_. Sometimes, as your Archbishop said though, it is hard to tell the difference, if only because you do not wish to know. And _that_ is when you must find an example of the Acceptable  - of someone who is absolutely and unequivocally and irredeemably Acceptable - and when you are in a quandary, ask yourself ‘what would so-and-so do? What would they think would be the right and acceptable thing to do?'”

“And do it?”

“And do it. Battle boots laced, shoulders back, chin out, and no apologies.”

“You want me to act like a _Gryffindor?”_  he said, scandalized. Lucius roared with laughter.

“Sadly, Master Longbottom… Our determined efforts to live as proponents of truth must, at least once in our lives, make Gryffindors of us all. That being said, you have my permission to select your moment, or moments, in advance as you are able, and to be as subtle with it as the moment calls for.”

“Mm.“ Neville shoved the covers aside and knelt again, wrapping his arms around him. Lucius gathered him up and held him tight.

"And what was that for?” he asked smiling down when Neville finally released him.

"It's nice," he said. "I like hugging. Gran's not big on it. And I hug Mum and Dad, but they don't hug back."

"Well then," his godfather said. "We shall have to give you one that will last till our next opportunity, won't we?" And with that, he hauled him in and squeezed him till he squawked for air, then threw him down and tickled him with his long elegant fingers till he was screaming with laughter.

*

He settled back. Uncle Luke tucked the straightened blankets around him, slid in beside him, and handed him the second of the two volumes of poetry.

"Who's your favourite poet, Uncle Luke?'" he wanted to know. “Do you have one?”

"I have several," he said. "Though when it comes down to it, I appreciate individual poems. Did you come across any that you particularly liked?'

Neville hesitated, then set the book he was holding aside, reached across, took the first volume from him and flipped pages before passing it back. Uncle Luke took it and read, first to himself, and then from the beginning again, aloud.

 

_Do not go gentle into that good night,_

_Old age should burn and rave at close of day;_

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

 

_Though wise men at their end know dark is right,_

_Because their words had forked no lightning they_

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

 

_Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright_

_Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,_

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

 

_Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,_

_And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,_

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

 

_Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight_

_Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,_

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

 

_And you, my father, there on the sad height,_

_Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray._

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

 

Neville picked at the sleeve of his pajamas as the man beside him read the last verse… Uncle Luke lowered the book, and reached out and touched his cheek, and turned his chin up, and leaned in and kissed his forehead gently.

"Malfoy to Longbottom," he said. "Allies and Allied."

"You're really not going to tell me I can't help because I'm just nine?'

Lucius Malfoy laughed softly again.

"He has already discounted you once," he said. "He not only won't see you coming, he will not allow himself to see you coming, because he is not the kind of individual, Master Longbottom, who likes to admit that he was wrong. Who is able to admit that he was wrong. _That_ little truth has saved my own arse more than once over the years, let me tell you. In truth, he hired me so that he would not ever be put in a position where he would ever have to admit it."

‘Oh. Wait, what do you mean, he's already discounted me once?'

"We will save that one," his godfather said. "For Christmas of your first year at Hogwarts."

“Uh?”

“That is when we will meet again, and re-evaluate our position and our strategy.”

“You’re saying I won’t see you again till then?” It was dismayed. “But Uncle Luke...”

“I’ll still be around and about, Master Longbottom, I promise. Just because you won’t see me doesn’t mean I won’t be there, mm? In the meantime though, as you know very well, and as your godmother and I have both already explained… This is the safest, and yes, the necessary, way.”’

"But..."

Uncle Luke tilted his chin again and looked him straight in the eye.

"This is the part," he said. "Where you say "yes, sir."

"Uh?'

"If I tell you to do something, Master Longbottom," he said exactingly. "You _will_ do it. No questions, no hesitations, simply because I do tell you to do it. In this instance, this context, you see… If you are truly serious on wanting to work with me _in_ this context...  I am not just your godfather or your ally. I am your superior officer."

It was not a joke. It was not _remotely_ a joke. Neville sat up cross-legged, facing him. Lucius regarded him equably, still propped against the  pillows and the headboard.

"Even if it's just me?' he said.

"Even if it's just you... What?'

"In your army."

"It is not just you. I have, and have had, other allies; I simply work with them on the purely individual basis, and they are not aware of each others' identities. It protects everyone."

Neville reached out and touched the Dark Mark.

"Did it hurt," he said.

"Yes," Uncle Luke said.

"Can you change to a spider again," he said. "And make the light?'

He obliged, lighting his wand tip and passing it off before appearing on his palm.  Neville brought his hand up nearly to his eye.

"Stretch your leg out," he directed. "The right front one."

The spider obliged. Neville lowered his hand. Uncle Luke blurred back.

"It's not there," he observed. "When you transform."

"No," Uncle Luke said. "It is not. I am a glass spider. Transparent. It translates. When I am in the form... My true form, the form that reflects my true self… All that I am: the _truth_ of all that I am, behind all the fact... Is revealed for all to see.”

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

Once upon a time and not quite three months later, on a sofa in a rain-lit parlour in a Manor in a country in a galaxy in a universe, as the story went, far, far away, Neville Frank Longbottom squared his round little jaw in a way that made him, for the first time in his short life, the absolute image of his lost father. He swung his legs down and stood, lifting that squared chin in a way that had, when demonstrated by his lost mother, made entire squadrons of Death Eaters quake in their battle boots. He shook out his shoulders, and strode to the door, hauling it open and marching down to the kitchens again. Frankie was there, alone, his eyes red and swollen as he measured spices into the sifter. He turned as Neville entered, jaw squared, chin up and shoulders set, and his eyes widened.

“What the…”

“Call them in,” the vision before him ordered. “All of them. Now.”

_“What?”_

“If they’re going to shut down the Project,” Longbottom of Longbottom said grimly, fixing his eye on the man before him in a way that offered proof that as long as its owner was alive, Augusta Domitia Claudia, Dame Lady Longbottom would never be dead in any universe...  “If they’re going to condemn my world, my _world,_ to a one-in-three chance of ending, and me and Potter to exile here for the rest of our lives, and maybe even After, all without even _trying,_ with the solution right _there..._ They’re going to have to look me straight in the eye and tell me themselves. To my _face.”_

“Ace,” Frankie said. “I don’t think…”

“You don’t have to think,” the Alien Clone of his Exalted Father cut him off. “You just have to do what I say.  Call them. Now. Tell them that Longbottom of Longbottom, Head of House Longbottom, requires their presence. Now.” He considered. “No, not now. I’ll need a bit of time to make a few arrangements first. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning, then. Sharp. And tell them to eat breakfast before they come, because you’re Longbottom of Longbottom too, not a walking bank vault or a bloody buggering line cook.”

“Ace?” Potter’s voice behind him was astonished. “What the…”

Neville turned. “Hey, Potter. Where’s Padre Tony?”

“Mucking off his boots.” He couldn’t take his saucered eyes off of him. “We were just out cleaning up after the hippogryphs. The paddock's one great swampy loo after all the rain. He said he’ll be along in a mo’.”

“Jesus, Mary and _Joseph,”_ Padre Tony said blankly as he appeared on cue. “What the fuckin' _hell?”_

And Neville Longbottom, no longer a blond, but with the dark, shining brown hair that he would have as an adult grown precisely to mid-back and neatly braided in the elegant, simple style modeled by Lucius Malfoy, turned to face him. Nothing else had changed, but now his dark brows drew attention to his eyes and his strong, firm mouth, rather than his round cheeks and snub little nose... He wore black trousers, a matching high-collared, thigh-length black tunic, and glossy knee-high boots, all made  of finest dragon leather, nailed and strapped with goblin-made steel. A pair of similar gloves were hooked to his leather belt, and on his finger was the Longbottom signet, shrunk to fit his hand.

“Oooh! Is that Frankie’s ring?” Potter hunkered down and prodded at his feet. “And are these battle boots, like you said your Uncle Luke wears? I _really_ like the way the wand holsters are formed as part of the side here, and _ooooooh!_ They’ve got the crest of your House inlaid on them! Only that’s not rubbish at _all,_ is it? Like name-tags, but all posh and polite and and proper!”

“Yes, and no. Frankie had his own ring made. This one’s mine.”

“Lovely.” Potter straightened. “Was it accidental magic, then?”

“No,” Neville lied, without so much as twitching a lash, much less blinking.  “It wasn’t. I told my magic what I wanted, and it made it.”

“Really?”

“Mm.”

“Huh,” Potter said. “Alright then.”

“Any particular reason we're going this route?” Padre Tony inquired.

“Yes. There is. I’m calling a meeting before the next vote. RUBY!”

There was the familiar pop. “Yes, Longbo…” She stopped, eyes round, mouth open.

“Prep the meeting chamber for the full contingent at nine tomorrow, ” Longbottom ordered. “Rows of benches with no backs or padding, no tables, and absolutely no refreshments.”

“No…” She looked utterly scandalized. _“Longbottom!”_

“They’ll be expecting them,” Longbottom said ruthlessly. “And will be soothed with it all, and the more they’re soothed, the more self-righteous and condescending they’ll be. And Potter and I are nine. Bit of a native disadvantage there, so we have to knock that right off before they ever get started with it, or we’re dead in the water. Oh, and when you tell them to come, Frankie, don’t tell them that it’s me who’s the Longbottom requiring it. Let them assume it’s you. Otherwise they’ll be patronizing on top of everything else, and if they try that on me again, one more time, I _will_ let Potter bite them. Every single one of them.”

“There’s not a whole lot of them who take me seriously, Ace,” his not-son said. “Sad as it is, I’m starting to realize how much Dad’s reputation helped me along in the Magical world. Now... Now I’m just a Low-Maj with an old name and a lot of money.”

“You just get them here. I’ll take care of the rest. RUBY!”

“Yes, Longbottom?” She appeared again.

“I’m going to need you to contact St. Roux in London. I need dress robes, special ones, and I need them by eight tomorrow morning.”

“By… Longbottom, the wait on access on even an entry-level tailor at St. Roux is being at least six months! We can be just transfiguring one of your robes here, and…”

“If they’re going to understand that I’m the real thing,” Neville cut her off. “I’m going to be wearing the real thing. There’s no room for metaphor here, Ruby, and if I’m magicked up and wearing something that’s second-rate underneath what it looks like, it won’t matter if they know. I’ll know, and that’s blinking. Also, no entry-level tailors. I didn’t say I wanted you to contact Chateau St. Roux. I said to contact St. Roux himself. _Him,_ we’ll make tea for."

“And how is Longbottom suggesting that Ruby convince him to come, again?”

“Tell him that it’s to help save the multiverse. Also, by giving him what he wants, that he doesn't know he wants. I’ll arrange to give him memory stills of whatever variations on his theme that my version of St. Roux developed in my time that his didn’t. He can do a whole new line with them; an exclusive release from my world, approved and sponsored by me, and I won’t even ask for shares or residuals. I just want the one outfit in return. But he needs to come here, because it’s a very particular outfit. Also, he can’t tell anybody he’s coming. I want to be able to surprise people as much as possible.”

“Ruby is making no promises,” Ruby said, resigned. “But Ruby will try.”

She flashed out.

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**January, 1991**

The hours passed all too quickly. Neville tried his best, but he was only nine, and there was the late night curry besides. Eventually, he drifted off, Uncle Luke's strong arm about him and to the warmth of his long, solid body against his as he read quietly and comfortably beside him. When he woke the next morning, he was alone. The books were set neatly the table. He reached over and picked up the first, rubbing his eyes. There was a marker in it - the neatly folded, creased and cleaned handkerchief that Uncle Luke had used to clean his face and fingers from the chocolate frogs. Neville opened the book, to the flyleaf first, on what instinct he was never able to say.  The original message from Uncle Luke to his father had been Vanished, and in its place...

**_My dearest Bond -_ **

**_Til Christmas, 1991. In the meantime - the classics are classics for a reason, and the marked page will, I am sure, give you quite enough to be going on with in terms of the requested and interim course of study._ **

**_Fondest remembrances -_ **

**_Fleming_ **

 

* * *

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

**8.50 A.M.**  

"Ace?" Potter poked his head around the corner of the loo. "Aren't you ready ye..." He stopped, mouth open.

"Hey Potter," Ace greeted him, turning from the mirror. He wore again the black trousers, tunic and battle boots, and the ring on this hand, but instead of his standard short over-robe, he now wore deep wine military robes identical to the ones hanging in his father's closet, accented in ivory and black and with the exquisitely embroidered high collar of his day. The crest of the Head of House Longbottom glimmered at his throat.

“You look _brilliant,”_ Potter said wholeheartedly. “Definitely taller, and you know, I don't reckon the boots have anything to do with it?'

“You look nice too,” Neville said, smiling at him crookedly.  “I really like the shirt.”

“Me too.” Potter looked down at himself. He wore perfectly crisp and starched navy cargo trousers, and his hair was stiffly spiked, the tips freshly gilded in glimmering gold. His now gold-winged shoes fluttered and flashed, charmed navy as his trousers, with double-knotted gold laces. His t-shirt was brilliant green to match his eyes, and on the front, emblazoned, was no dragon, but the magically revolving image of the planet. Juxtaposed against the planet was the bold silhouette of a St. Michael’s spider, standing and rearing, forelimbs raised as double wands. Above it, in equally bold block print, were the two words of the Potter House motto:

**WE STAND**

“Oh,” he said, and dug hastily. “Here. Big Harry's wands. One for you, one for me.”

“No,” Neville said. “You wear them both. Here.  I’ll help you.” He knelt and strapped the holsters to Potter’s legs. At his height, they were more mid-thigh than calf. The gold and bronze bands shone brightly.

“But what about you?”

“I don’t need a wand,” Longbottom of Longbottom said. He stood and straightened his robes again, looking the smaller boy straight in the eye. “I’ve got everything I need already.  My title, the truth, and my friend to Stand with me. To the end of the world.”

Potter blushed. Violently.

“Alright,” he said when he’d recovered somewhat. “What do we do now? I mean… Once we’re there? Call for attention, or what?”*

“Uncle Luke usually just walks in and stands and waits for people to notice him. Works a treat. Course, he’s six and a half feet and built like a troll again.”

“We’re six and a half feet together,” Potter said doubtfully. “Maybe. If you cut us in half and stood us side by side.”

“Mm. No.” Neville squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. “Don’t blink, don’t blink, don’t blink… Alright, then. Let’s Get This Thing Done.”

They made their way down the staircase, out of the tower, and through the halls. In the distance, they could hear the murmur of voices as the rising wave of the sea. As they turned the last, Neville peeked around the corner.

“Door’s open,” he reported, ducking back. “We’re clear.”

“Do you actually have a plan?” Potter asked. “Or are we just going to…” He waved a hand vaguely.

“What are we, Gryffindors? Of course I have a plan,” Neville lied brazenly.

“What, going in there and not blinking?”

“Pretty much,” he admitted candidly. “It’s alright though. It’s going to be alright. I might never have met an actual dragon, but I’ve got Gran, and I haven’t blinked with her since I came to live with her, even if I let her think I have.”

“I reckon I’ve had more than a bit of practice along those lines too,” Potter conceded. “I never would have got caught out by the frying pan if Dudders’ great squashy arse hadn’t been pressed against the window of the stove and staring me right in the face when I was inside. I was closing my eyes then just so I wouldn’t sick up from the sight, and kept them closed when it exploded. Then Aunt Petunia knocked my glasses off and they broke, and my eye landed on the pieces, and that did _that_ in.”

“I have a hard time picturing you with glasses,” Neville said, distracted. “I dunno that I think they’d work for you.”

“They didn’t work for me either,” Potter admitted. “Partly because I’d had the same pair since I was four, but mostly because I kept them dirty so Aunt Petunia wouldn’t see my eyes so much again. Not for blinking, but because she hated the colour.”

“What’s wrong with the colour?”

“It was my mum’s. Though I couldn’t win there, yeah, because without them, I looked like her, and with them, I looked like my dad. He had glasses too. Do you look like your parents?”

“No. Not really. I mean, there are bits from certain angles, I reckon, but… No.  I’m just me.”

“Brilliant,” Potter said, and after a pause, looking studiously down at the fluttering wings on his shoes… “I reckon _you’re_ pretty brilliant.”

Neville didn’t say anything to that- it seemed impolite, never mind imprudent, to provoke the raging blush any further - so he just peeked around the corner again, and when he withdrew, shook back his braid, lifted his chin, and reaching out, took the scrawny little hand firmly.

“Erhm.” Potter looked down. “What…”

“Longbottom to Potter,” Neville said. “Allies and Allied.”

“What does that mean?”

“That my House promises to Stand with yours, till The Thing Gets Done. You’re Potter of Potter on our world. We’re equals, there, so I can say it to you, as Head of your House. Only Heads can say it.”

“Oh.” The thin little shoulders straightened. “Alright, then. Potter to Longbottom. Allies and Allied.” He paused. “ _Just_ till The Thing Gets Done? What about after?”

“There’s always something that needs Getting Done,” Neville said dismissively. “So… Allies and Allied, Always.”

“Always,” Potter affirmed - and both boys jumped violently as gold light promptly shot out from their joined fingertips, wrapping itself as chains all the way up to their shoulders before dissipating just as abruptly. “What the bloody bollocking buggering hell was _that?”_

“No idea,” Neville said. “It didn’t do that when me and Uncle Luke said it. We didn’t say the always part, though it was kind of implicit, so maybe that made the difference? Does it hurt? I mean, did it hurt? Are you hurt?"

“No.” Potter pulled back to examine his own palm. “What…”

“What, what?”

“Here, lemme…” He grabbed his hand again. Neville looked down on it. On his own palm, likewise etched in glowing gold was…

 _“M?_ What does that stand for?”

“It’s not an M,” Potter said. “It’s ehwaz. Two identical symbols facing each other like in a mirror, and linked. It means partnership.”

“You mean it’s a rune?

“Yeah.”

“So your magic did it?”

“No. It was both of ours. It would have to be. Both of our magic, meeting in the middle.  And shaking hands.”

“Oh. That’s very neat. We’ll sort it out later. Right now…” He took his hand firmly again. "Ready?"

“Erhm. You might not want to do that,” Potter said after a moment. “I mean… We might not.  Only they’ll all think we’re bent again, and get distracted.”

“The entire point of this, Potter,” Longbottom of Longbottom said patiently. “Is that it doesn’t matter what they think.”

“Don’t you care? If they thought that?”

“Why would I care? It’s a stupid thing to care about. I mean, alright, maybe they do here, but they don’t at home. I don’t think, anyway.”

“They _don’t?_ Wait, do you know people who are... In our world? And how can nobody _care?_ I’ve never met _anybody_ who doesn’t care!”

“I dunno. Maybe it’s a Magical thing? Gran told me about it, anyway, when she was telling me about Solace. I wanted to know what ‘uninclined to marry’ meant, from the book on it,  and she said it’s when you’re bent. You can still get married with it, she said; it’s legal in the Magical world even though it’s not for Nomaji, or at least it’s not illegal, but there are still the issues of Heirs, so Solace is their way of  accommodating for it. As for caring… Everybody’s got their own opinions, but she said it’s mostly about manners again, and Accepted Public Traditions, and nobody could bring up the subject in the Wizengamot without worrying on someone else being impolite enough to bring up the realities of What Happens At School These Days. Well, all the days. Historically speaking. She says nobody’s immune there, so everybody keeps their mouth shut because talking about it isn’t an Accepted Public Tradition again, and while everyone’s all over breaking rules and changing laws, Tradition is something else altogether.”

“Oh,” Potter said blankly. “So she wouldn’t mind? If you were? I mean… It’d be one thing if it was all theoretical, but another if it weren’t. Wouldn’t it? And what would your godparents think?’

Neville shrugged. “Uncle Luke says it’s all about the person, really. He loves Auntie Niss, but there was a boy he loved once too, and he said it wasn’t about him being a boy; it was about him being the person he was, who happened to _be_ a boy.  And I’d asked Gran about it when we had our discussion if it would bother her, and she said that she would hope that when I fall in love with someone that my regard for them  won’t be solely defined by the fact that they have one set of bits over the other, and that if it happens to be a person inside a boy, that we’ll just arrange Solace again. That that’s part of what it’s for.”

“Oh. Only I don’t think it was like that here, in our equivalent time. At all.”

“Obviously not. But we’re not from here, are we, and we’re not going to be staying here, so they can think what they want. They will anyway. That’s fine, as long as they _do_ what _we_ want.”

“What if they don’t? What if the vote goes the wrong way?”

“It won’t."

“But…”

“It. _Won’t.”_ It was absolutely immovable.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because there’s not going to be a vote. They don’t know it yet, but they forfeited their rights there when they made their call and got _me_ on the line.”

Potter’s mouth actually dropped a bit at that. Neville just tossed his braid back again, grimly.

“I am not staying here, Potter,” he said. “I have my family, my House, my country, my war, my life... I have   _promises_ to keep. And no one… _No_ one…. Is going put me in a position where I have to stand before my mother and father and my Gran and Auntie Niss and Uncle Luke in the After and tell them that I let them down. That the son and grandson and godson that they all did everything but _die_ for - and believe you me, dying would have been easier than keeping going  - didn’t respect them enough to fight a battle for them that compared to what they all went through… Is nothing at all.”

“Taking on an entire world to get your way is nothing at _all?_ I reckon I’m a bit afraid then, to think on what you’d think is something.”

“God. And I already took Him on, when I told Him to wee or get off the pot, and look where we are now.”

“There’s that,” Potter conceded. “Alright. There’s definitely that.” He stood a little taller himself. “Alright. Alright. Further Up and Further In, right?”

“For Aslan and Narnia,” Longbottom of Longbottom agreed. “And Narnians everywhere. No matter the bloody buggering time, no matter the bloody buggering bollocking _world.”_

And he pushed the door open, and hand in hand, they stepped through.

 

* * *

 

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**January, 1990**

Neville took his godfather’s handkerchief from the book, tucked it neatly in the pocket of his pajama trousers, and flipped the page to the marked poem.

 

_If you can keep your head when all about you_

_Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,_

_If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,_

_But make allowance for their doubting too;_

_If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,_

_Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,_

_Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,_

_And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:_

 

_If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;_

_If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;_

_If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster_

_And treat those two impostors just the same;_

_If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken_

_Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,_

_Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,_

_And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:_

 

_If you can make one heap of all your winnings_

_And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,_

_And lose, and start again at your beginnings_

_And never breathe a word about your loss;_

_If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew_

_To serve your turn long after they are gone,_

_And so hold on when there is nothing in you_

_Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’_

 

_If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,_

_Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,_

_If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,_

_If all men count with you, but none too much;_

_If you can fill the unforgiving minute_

_With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,_

_Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,_

_And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!_

 

Neville Frank Longbottom, Longbottom of Longbottom, turned back to the flyleaf and traced the words gently with a finger. Even as he did so, they disappeared. He let out a small sound in protest. As if on cue, a single sentence popped into his head, warm and deep and reassuring as the voice of its owner.

**_Just because you won’t see me, doesn't mean that I won’t be there._ **

 


	6. Rage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we must stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.”
> 
> ― Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons

 

_“There’s that,” Potter conceded. “Alright. There’s definitely that.” He stood a little taller himself. “Alright. Alright. Further Up and Further In, right?”_

_“For Aslan and Narnia,” Longbottom of Longbottom agreed. “And Narnians everywhere. No matter the bloody buggering time, no matter the bloody buggering bollocking_ world. _”_

_And he pushed the door open, and hand in hand, they_

“What,” Potter said as he stopped dead in his tracks, one fluttering winged foot poised over the threshold. “Is _that?”_

* * *

The room was packed: rows upon rows of the perfunctorily summoned settled uncomfortably on the backless, unpadded benches. The smell of turned, damp earth and greenery was strong again, drifting through the opened windows, but now, to Neville’s gardener’s nose, it all smelled... Not wrong, exactly, but subtly alien again. Every fiber of his being now on hypersensitive alert, he followed the other boy’s gaze to the front of the room. There was a table there - a table that he most definitely hadn’t ordered up. On it was...

Neville glanced sideways. Potter’s face was dead white, his nostrils flared, high spots of colour on his cheeks. He stood, poised, both scrawny hands gone instinctively to the wands strapped to his legs. A low hissing sound began to rise. The murmuring voices stopped abruptly. Eyes turned, skidding as the image of the St. Michael’s spider on Potter’s shirt suddenly seemed to rise and take three-dimensional form, struggling to fight free of the fabric. It was obviously unconscious magic, but still. The shirt twisted and thrashed. The hiss rose to a near-rabid, outraged squeal.

Benches scraped in alarm.  Neville, despite himself, reached out and placed a hand over the scrawny chest, covering, not Potter’s eyes, but the spider’s. The hiss stopped abruptly. That was only the spider, though.  Potter’s little face was twisted in a black, feral snarl as he fixed his gaze on the object on the table.

 _Subjective context,_ Neville thought. As the last piece in a puzzle, or the last strand in a web, he saw, again in the faces before him, as clearly as Lucius Malfoy ever had, the possibilities and paths, past present and future:  the twists, the turns, the false paths and at the center of all, not the way home, but home itself. _No matter what it was like for Big Harry, it’s never been Riddle who needs doing for him, any more than it is for me_.

His own words echoed back around in his memory as he’d spoken them to Big Nev the first time he’d seen him in his portrait, as he turned back to examine and absorb every detail of the huge gilded frame, the carefully dusted and magically maintained colours, and the tall, thin, gaudily attired figure within.

_He really gets around, that bloke, in person and in chocolate._

* * *

 

“My dear, dear boys.” The figure’s painted blue eyes blinked moistly. From the looks on their varied family members’ faces, it was obvious that the portrait had been as much a surprise to all them as it was to Neville and Harry themselves. ‘Livid’ didn’t even begin to cover it. “Ah. No, I don’t suppose you would recognize me at this point in your lives, would you. Allow me to introduce myself, then. I am…”

“We know who you are,” Neville cut him off, and if his squared jaw and the set of his shoulders under the military robes made him, in that moment, the image of his father, and his lifted chin and braced battle stance the image of his mother, his tone, just at that moment - not high, childish or timid, but crisp, controlled and brooking absolutely no responsive nonsense whatsoever - echoed with the precise intonation of his grandmother’s.  “We both do.”

The twinkle dimmed a regretful notch as it turned to him.

“I am not the Albus Dumbledore of your world, Mr. Longbottom,” the figure within the frame said gently.  “And I am not your enemy, or Harry’s, any more than, I am certain, my counterpart is.”

“Longbottom’s fine. As it’s a title in this context, not a name, there’s no ‘Mr.’ required. And I don’t speak for Potter - that would be rude to say the least, considering his opinion on people who are in the habit there - but you don’t get to decide who my enemies are. Also? I don’t need you to tell me any details about the man you’re based on. Big Nev’s already told me everything I need to know there.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. He did. He said that your source material wasn’t God, though he thought he was the next best thing, and was all over the ‘leave it to me’, except when he was all over the ‘it’s all down to you'. And that the ‘leave it to me’ usually came right before the ‘I’ve got someone queued up to take on the responsibility and blame so that none of the rest of us, myself included, have to’. Oh, and that he was very good at inciting positive public morale, though usually at the expense of getting things done in a clear, straightforward and expedient manner that might have saved any number of lives, and that he had a very bad habit of leading innocent people into, and leaving them in, even worse situations for… What was that lovely little phrase you and Gellert Grindelwald came up with together back in the day - ‘the Greater Good’?”

A definite sour snigger rose from Gin Potter’s direction at that one. It harmonized quite well with those of her three children. Neville turned his back deliberately, the ghost of much larger, cool and elegant fingers wrapped about his as he took Potter’s right hand firmly and pulled it away from the wand on his hip. The gold runes on their hands warmed as they touched. He made his voice as calm as he could. As deep as he could. As ringing as he could. “You’re alright, Potter. It’s just a portrait. Paint and echoes and magical projection is all.  Nothing _real.”_

“It’s _not_ alright,” Potter said vehemently, though the black in his eyes faded a bit. “It’s not… It’s not…”

“No,” Neville said. “It’s not. But _you_ are.” Carefully, mindfully, he visualized a great shining web, and himself placing a foot on the first strand of the perimeter, turning to the next - the only _logical_ next  - path. “And it’s not going to work,” he addressed the crowd. “For the record. So you might as well take it out and put it back on the wall where you got it. Then we can just get on with Getting the Thing Done.”

“What do you mean,” Potter said suspiciously, into the telling pause that followed _that_.  Chagrined looks abounded. The livid expressions on those of the immediate family faded a little. Frankie murmured something to Stella. _Her_ troubled look was gone completely; her expression could now best described as grimly smug. She caught Neville’s eye and offered a very discreet thumbs up. The thumb was charmed bright green. “What isn’t going to work?”

“They all know exactly  why they’re here, Potter. Why I told them to come. It’s to give them the opportunity to tell us to our faces that they’ve already made up their minds. That the vote’s a sham. They don’t want to admit it straight out though, to us or to themselves, because they know that what they’re doing _is_ wrong, so they’ve  brought _that_ in” - he nodded to the portrait - ”to convince us that staying here would be for the best. To convince us that we _want_ to stay here. That way they won’t actually have to make the hard decision themselves, or take responsibility for the results, because the vote will be cancelled before they ever put it on the floor and they can put the results on us, just like they always put it on Big Harry.”

“Why would they they think that we would care what _he_ has to say?” Potter demanded furiously. “He’s the one who dumped Big Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the first place! Who got us _into_ this mess, by convincing a whole world  that no one but the person that _he_ decided on could ever be strong enough or smart enough to be the solution to _any_ problem! Don’t they _realize_ that? That he’s the one who’s responsible for their pain, by convincing them that none of them, or their children, or their children’s children, would ever, ever, ever be good enough to save _themselves?”_

“No,” Neville said simply. “They’ve never had to realize it, Potter because he didn’t just convince them, he convinced Big Harry. And Big Harry always got the job done, so there was no reason for anyone to question him.”

“Big Nev did, it sounds like!”

“Big Nev never really liked him though,  or respected him either. He’d proved right from the beginning, after all, that he didn’t care about his family, just like his counterpart’s proved that he doesn’t care about me.”

“How d’you mean?’ Potter asked, puzzled. “What did he - they - ever do to you?”

“It’s not what he - they - did, it’s what they didn’t do. He never once visited Big Nev’s parents,” Neville said matter-of-factly. “Any more than his counterpart’s visited mine. Gran said he came in once to the hospital to bring the phoenix tears that fixed them physically, but he’s never come back since. Big Nev said the Dumbledore here never did. Not once in all the years between That Night and the night he died. We reckon it didn’t really matter to our parents, but it did... Does… Matter to   _us_. He went off and left you and Big Harry with the Dursleys, to everything that would happen to you after… But he went off and ignored my and Big Nev’s parents, after everything  they’d already gone through. After they were _tortured._ For _hours._ Into _insanity._ And left _alive._  After everything they did for the war effort, for their country, for _him,_ because he was in _charge,_ and they _trusted_ him… The Great Bloody Bollocking Albus Dumbledore couldn’t be buggered, even once, just like he couldn’t be buggered with you and Big Harry, in the end - to check in and see how they were getting on. How their family was getting on. Not. _Once.”_

“Well, _that’s_ rubbish!” Potter was not the only one who looked appalled. Frankie and Stella’s matching cold smirks, on the other hand, were now in full bloom. _“And_ rude!”

“It really is,” Neville agreed, making his way forward to the front of the room and leaning back against the table, arms folded, as he pictured Uncle Luke might have done.  “Gran’s not too fond of him for that. I mean, she’s polite and all, but then again, you can’t always tell with Gran. She’s polite to everybody except Uncle Algie, and even then, she saved really expressing herself there for the two times he actively tried to kill me. I can tell, though. She checks the sign-in book every other week when we go in ourselves, to see if anyone’s come to say hello, and his name’s never been there. Bit cold, really, if you ask me, but then again, it’s not like they can do anything for him in their current state, is there, so it’s like she says. What can you expect from a pig but a grunt.”

The figure in the portrait actually managed to look hurt at that.

“I’m not sure,” Potter boosted himself up on the table beside him. “Was _that_ rude?”

“It was a generic statement. If anyone here -  or anyone’s image sourced from someone else who is no longer here -  were to take it personally, they would need to examine their own consciences. On the purely personal level, I _think_ I was expressing myself, but I’m not sure. I know you haven’t had much more experience with that than I have, but you’ve been here three months longer than I have. What do you think?”

“Walking the line, maybe, but then, so is assuming that you have the right to decide whether five billion people live or die, and that’s only the one world in the multi-verse,” Potter conceded. “That’s much ruder, _I_ think, specially when the solution’s right _there._ Never mind that if you’re going to make that kind of decision out of self-interest, the least you can do is be honest about it, and not try to arrange things so that you can blame the results on the majority consensus  to make yourself feel better about your part in it.”

“Or shuffle it off on two nine-year-olds,’ Neville agreed. “Bit of a contradiction there, yeah? On the one hand, they invited us here and made all sorts of promises, and now that it’s all gone boots-up, they’re telling us we’re only kids and not qualified to have a say in anything even though we’re the ones who are most affected.  On the other hand, they’re trying to turn it around and lay the decision on us just as if we’re real adults with a vote, because they don’t want to take personal _responsibility.”_

“You forgot the third hand,” Potter offered. “The one where they’ve all been telling themselves and each other that you’re a great bloody bollocking liar who’s taking the piss on the details of the First Prophecy and the end of the world in the first place.  Though honestly, and considering how the other two options reflect so badly on them, I can see how they’re thinking that’s the most attractive of the three alternatives. “

“I haven’t forgotten,” Neville said. “I was being polite and pretending I hadn’t heard, just in case they happened to be properly embarrassed  over it.“

“Your transcript of your version of Beedle’s tales, if you’ll forgive me,” Dumbledore said to him gently. _“Is_ written in rather colloquial language.”

“Coll…”

“Modern,” Neville translated, not looking at the painting. “Lots of books have lots of different translations. Some even use language that reflect the time they were translated in.”

“So you weren’t paraphrasing?” Dumbledore probed.

“Para…”  Potter wrinkled his nose. Neville had his suspicions on that wrinkle... He happened to know that Potter knew exactly what ‘paraphrase’ meant; he could recall at least three incidents where he’d used the word himself, but as it did balance his rather obviously put-on, wide-eyed, innocent look of childish naivete to absolute perfection, he wasn’t inclined to call him on it.

“Ah. That means…”

“Changing the words to make them sound more interesting,” Neville clarified. “And possibly the meaning of what was being said along with them. No.  I was not. It states very clearly in the preface I copied out that the Tales, such as they are, are the extended narrative framework of the First Prophecy again. If you’ve noticed, the bits that are quotes from that direct prophecy are transcribed exactly as they were presented to the Seer in their own time, and yes, the tone’s quite different from the stories surrounding it when they go on about toast and bacon for breakfast and things, but those aren’t really the bits that matter, are they? They’re facts, not truth, and the author obviously put them in like that in the updated edition in order to  provide a more striking aesthetic narrative contrast to the truly significant content - the prophecy again - all while working to attract a new audience from the current generation by using familiar and personally relevant points of reference.”

There was a small, astonished silence.

“Alrighty then,” Potter said politely. “Thank you for explaining that. I, for one, feel much enlightened.”

”My pleasure. Norton’s ‘Literary Devices and How to Apply Them’,” Neville informed the stupefied conglomerate. “It’s all there. Not with the specific book as a case study,’ he added scrupulously. “But it has similar examples, with everything that should be taken into account when claiming credit for what isn’t really original content at all, just variations on the theme.”

“And isn’t that exactly what you’ve said that you’re planning to do in your own future?” someone demanded. ”As a novelist? That you’re going to go home and write all about us and our history, and claim credit for it all in your world as original content?”

“Not at all. I plan to put a disclaimer at the beginning of each book in the voice of the purported fictional narrator stating that I-slash-he had a vision of another world and future, and events that took place there that didn’t here, and I’m just transcribing them. Even if I came right out and said ‘I traveled to another universe and this is what it was like there’, people would think of it as imaginative phrasing, and that I’m speaking on behalf of the purely fictional hero in the story, as he’s dictating the phrasing to the transcriptionist. That’s fine. They can think what they want, and will, but it’ll all  be right there, so no one could ever say that I didn’t actually tell them the truth.”

“But isn’t that what brought you here?” Dumbledore probed. “Hope for an impossible future, and a new _version_ of truth? One that you could, perhaps, write for yourself? There is merit in the saying that it does not do to dream to the point that one forgets to live… But dreams are also  that which provoke and fuel our ability to overcome the restrictions that nature places upon us, and to move beyond them. To become greater than we ever imagined we could be. Dreams, and imagination, and you are obviously well equipped with both, as well as the drive, as you are here with us now, to _exercise_ both.”

Far from being offended (as he suspected had been the portrait’s intent; it was just so obviously an attempt to provoke a childish, flustered response, thus putting himself back in charge of events), Neville actually and openly rolled his eyes at that.

“Truth isn’t a broomstick that you can trade in every year for a new version, Mr. Dumbledore. Truth is absolute. It doesn’t change; it can’t, because it’s _true_. You might not like it, but that doesn’t mean you can just switch up the details to suit your own preferences. To think that you can… To tell other people that they can... That’s not offering them hope, that’s telling them lies. And before you say that that’s what Big Harry did…  He didn’t. He just went to people and showed them a new approach to solving a problem that had never been tried before - an approach that would prove that what they’d always thought was impossible was just really, really improbable. Not changing truth, but testing a theory that the truth is bigger than they’d ever imagined, or been told, all along. That’s experimental science, not arrogance.”

“How,” someone started.

“He reads _books,”_ Potter cut him off impatiently.  “From the _library._ Also, it wasn’t dreams or imagination that fueled anything.  It was Big Harry and Astra, and applied Runes and Arithmancy.” 

“It wasn’t a book that time either, actually,” Neville offered. “It was the Pope.”

“Erhm,” Padre Tony said involuntarily. _“What?_ You’ve met the fu... Er. The _Pope?_ ”

“No, no. It was that one time when he was visiting London again. He didn’t come to St. Paul’s, but Gran and I were at the restaurant for lunch after, before we went to see Mum and Dad, and they had his public sermon on the telly over the bar. It was very good. He talked about how people get bigger, not because they have the ability to change the truth, but when they come to understand that the truth is bigger than they think it is. And that when you understand that, _really_ understand it…  That’s when you start seeing that most miracles aren’t really miracles at all. They’re true possibility, born, not of believing that you’re the most central or  important thing out there, but of understanding, _really_ understanding, that every detail, every person, however big or small or where they’re situated, is an essential part of everything else. That it’s all One. He said that when you understand that, and start treating yourself and things and other people accordingly, Things Change. The kaleidoscope shifts, and all the bits you thought you knew shift too, and they’re all still there, but in a new - new to you, anyway -  pattern. And the light behind it shows in new ways, that reveal the next bit of the Road ahead. The Road we all travel to the Source of all things. To God.”

That last was just a bit self-conscious. He actually shifted under the priest’s sudden, intent gaze. The man’s expression was peculiar to say the least -  alive and curious and thoughtful, as if he were seeing, for the first time, something, _really_ seeing something,  something he hadn’t anticipated seeing -  in the face of the boy before him. He opened his mouth, actually hesitated a moment, and closed it again.

“I don’t suppose you’d write that all out for me?” he asked, instead of saying… Whatever it was that he’d intended to say. “And the rest of the sermon? When we’re done here?”

“I could,” Neville said. He felt a bit unbalanced: uncertain suddenly  himself, of where to next put his mental feet. The web before him, in his imagination, had abruptly sprouted several new paths. No, not paths. _Levels._ “I could do that, yes. Though…” He scrambled a bit - _don’t blink don’t blink don’t -_ and, playing for time and composure, let loose with the first thing that popped into his head. “It would depend on whether you’re willing to do something for me first.”

“And what would that be?”

He couldn’t stand where he was forever, he thought. In his mind, he glanced around wildly. Paths and paths, levels and levels…

**_When it doubt, follow your gut._ **

“Answer a question,” he said, without letting himself think again. Guts, after all… Didn’t. “I didn’t invite you here just so you could tell me the truth that I already knew, or so you could ask me more questions. I invited you here so you can all answer a question _I_ have. If you do insist on holding what can only be called a completely immoral vote, and do plan to make us live here, I think that answer would be a fair exchange for the inconvenience, don’t you?”

‘What would you like to know, Longbottom?” Scorpius  said encouragingly. Neville braced himself, rebalancing himself on the new line suddenly appeared under his mental feet, and choosing his next words carefully, carefully. It wasn’t where he’d expected to land, no, but still. The particular inquiry, and his desire to know the answer, were yet perfectly valid. Relevant, even, and now he was annoyed besides. Padre Tony, he thought, might be vocationally mandated to keep whatever he saw, heard or thought inside his head, but the corollary was that Neville was now having a very hard time reading him. Not because he couldn’t, but because his own much vaunted, deeply ingrained, be-buggering bollocky bleeding _manners_ wouldn’t let him _look._

Padre Tony, he decided (and never mind the way Potter was now staring at him with besotted, breathless interest as he awaited their furthered exchange) much like the God he represented, might not actually qualify as bollocks, but he was definitely, _definitely,_ an Official Pain in the Arse.

“There are a lot of you here,” he said. “I’m told, who voted against the Project in the first place. Who didn’t want it started at all, and thought it was an exercise in pride and arrogance, and that the right thing to do would be to let things play out naturally in my world however they would.” His eye targeted the South American contingent before moving back to Padre Tony. “Like God _planned_ . I get that. I do. I got it right after I asked, when I said ‘Wouldn’t they want my world to be saved,’ and they said the world wasn’t really at stake; it was more of a metaphor. For wanting to ward against the particular _future._ That Riddle caused. What I _also_ asked then, though - next -  and what _didn’t_ get answered, because the people I asked literally ran away from having _to_ answer, was this. “Why wouldn’t they want my Mum and Dad to be saved’?

There was silence. Collected again now, refocused on the light ahead, Neville watched carefully again as everyone present - not just the South Americans, he noticed with interest - cast each other suggestive, hopeful glances, everyone willing someone else to answer the question put to them.

Finally…

"It wasn't really.... Argh." Albus Potter, rather than Padre Tony again, ran his hands through his white hair. It stuck up wildly. "It wasn't about not wanting to save them, Longbottom. It wasn't really about them at all. Of course they wanted them to be helped, but... It was more…”

He stuck. Neville boosted himself up to sit on the table, deliberately blocking their view of Dumbledore.

“I know it’s bound to be a bit of a complex answer,” he said encouragingly. “But I thought about it, you see? I’ve _been_ thinking about it. It wasn’t just that it was an uncomfortable question, or wanting to leave it to God. The people were all avoiding answering the question _as I phrased it._ Not ‘didn’t they want them to be saved’ - because that would have been a simple ‘yes, of course they would; who wouldn’t’ -  but _‘why_ wouldn’t they want them to be saved.’ And they didn’t want to answer that, and that means that there _was_ a reason that they didn’t want them to get better. That they were actively against the thought of them recovering at all. _That’s_ the bit I don’t understand, you see? And that’s the bit I _want_ to understand, that I _need_ to understand, because I’m guessing that some of the people who said that the Project shouldn’t be started in the first place are some of the same people who are saying now, that sending me and Potter back, isn’t the right thing to do. That again, the Gate should be closed, and everything should be left to God. And it would be for a different reason than the rest who plan to vote no have, right? Not self interest or fear or avoiding personal responsibility at all.  The _results_ would be the same, but the _reasons_ are different. So I want to know what that reason is. Because if it’s a good reason…’ He phrased his words carefully, remembering Uncle Luke’s words - **_give them what they want till they choke on it -_ ** . “It could make a difference, you see? _The_ difference. In my ability to understand your point of view on why you think it’s alright to skive off on a thirty three percent chance on the _five billion people_ who live on my world, not just the empty world itself, _dying,_ because of something that you all _did_ choose to start, and spent thirty years working toward finishing, in the first place.”

 

* * *

 

He waited patiently. Potter glanced at him and back at the gathered people. They all looked, to the man and woman, thoroughly, thoroughly trapped. Cornered, even.

Again, finally…

"Mind if I conjure myself a chair for this one?” Padre Tony said abruptly.

“Toninho…”

“Hush, Ma.’ He shoved himself to his feet. “I told you all this would come, that it _had_ to come, and did you fuckin’ listen to me? No. You did not. So… Here  we are. Not to say ‘I told you so’... Again... But what the hell. I told you so. Well?”

Neville didn’t answer, just held out a palm - the palm of the hand with the Longbottom signet on it… In acquiescence. Tony flicked his wand. A chair appeared. He carried it forward and placed it at an angle to the table, facing the two boys. The dark green eyes examined him. Potter boosted himself up too, not directly next to Neville, but close enough to touch if they both were to reach...

"Lemme ask you something, Longbottom," Padre Tony said abruptly again. "When Big Nev showed up in your parents’ photo and  invited you to join the Project, did you ever, even for a second, think about saying no?"

Neville gave him a weird look.

"No," he said. "Of course not."

"Why ‘of course not’?”

"Because it was saving the world? And Mum and Dad?"

"You think Big Nev knew you'd feel that way?'

"Yes, of course. We're matched.”

"Mm. Alright. Let me refine the question for you a bit, then. Did you ever think, even for a second, that you had the real _option_ of saying no?”

One foot poised for his next mental step, Neville paused again. "How do you mean?” he asked cautiously.

"If Big Nev knew what you'd say," the burly priest said. "Because you match, and the world knew what you'd say because they knew Big Nev would say it too, how much of it was really your choice?”

_"What?'_

"They knew you'd do it," Padre Tony said. "That you’d say yes to coming here, because Big Nev had already agreed to go _there._ Same with the button there, and Big Harry. Career heroes, the lot of you; you’re all a bit predictable that way. You present your case in terms of 'the world will end if you don't do it', well. As your predecessor - and I'm betting you'd say too - Bang goes _that._ "

"Nobody told me I had to do _anything,"_ Neville said defensively. "I _decided._ On my _own.”_

"Did you? Did you really? You’re really telling me that you actually, once it was all laid out, stopped and thought, 'nope, not for me, sorry, World; to hell with you then, never mind all the kids who might end up with mums and dads just like mine,’ never mind your opening your eyes the day after the Gate closed for good, and thinking 'I made the right decision, Mum and Dad will be just fine, they'll never know the difference after all and Gran wouldn't have wanted me to take the chance anyway. Eighty five percent odds, those aren't that good, never mind that ninety eight percent chance of preventing the biggest Dark Wanker of all time from making his comeback on a level that would provoke an entire world into manipulating time and the cosmos to get past the pain, five generations later?’'

"Of course not!"

"Why not? "

"Because..." He fumbled.  “Because…”

The adults waited silently. Tony Silva sat back.

"What if they hadn't told you," he said deliberately. "That they could fix your folks? What if they'd just left you with the incentive of that ninety eight percent chance of preventing Riddle’s return and the end of the world? Would it have affected your decision?”

"No," Neville said instantly.

"Mm. And do you think that they” - he waved a hand about, indicating the present horde. “Might have known _that?'_

Neville suddenly and distinctly, did not like the way the conversation was going.

"They didn't need to bait the hook," Padre Tony said. "Not with that particular fly of your parents’ recovery, Longbottom. They could have just surprised you with it when you got home. Not told you at all, just in case it didn't work. Fifteen percent odds that it’d all fall through…  It’s not a big chance of failure, but it’s not insignificant either. Significant enough so that saving it for a surprise… A possible reward, even…Would have been the reasonable thing to do. The _kind_ thing. Just in case, again, it didn’t work. But they were selfish. They wanted to see your reaction to the offer. Your excitement, your anticipation… Your _gratitude._ They wanted to be your heroes.  To feel good about _themselves._ They wouldn’t ever see the good results of all their efforts themselves, see? Seeing your reaction to their promise of it would be as close as they could get.  So they told you that you’d be saving your mum and dad with this deal, never mind how utterly completely fuckin’ _cruel_ it was to do it when they knew that there was a fifteen percent chance that it might not ever _happen_  - and in doing it, they both  got to feel good about themselves, _and_ eliminated the  ever-so-slight possibility that you’d hesitate to put your signature  on the contract. _They took your choice away from you_.  Because you know what the thing is about being nine? The thing that just comes with being a fuckin’ human being at that age? You think everything that happens is your fault. Flip side of the coin... You think it's your job to fix everything. They didn't just pick the age you’re at right now because you're squishy, see?  That was what they told themselves, and it was true... But there was a nice little side-effect there too. They picked you because you’re squishy… And because you’re at the precise point, developmentally and psychologically speaking, where you were sure to project that the responsibility for saving everything, every _body._.. Was all on _you."_

The room resounded with the echo of his words. Neville stared at him, mouth ajar, as the man before him sat back again.

"They got you good, Longbottom of Longbottom," Tony Hernandez de Silva said precisely. "Fucked you over good and proper, in fact.  And what about the button there? He was going to say no? Never mind working that fuckin’ saving-the-world complex of his, they offered him a way out of the hell he lived in, and the demons he lived with.... _Forever._ And not just an out, but the pretty picture of an older, superhero version of himself going back in to get his wand in in revenge. How the hell… How the fuckin’ _hell,_ I ask you… Was he supposed to resist _that?”_

* * *

 

The damp spring wind blew softly through the window, ruffling Potter’s spikes. To Neville’s gardener’s nose, it didn’t just smell alien now; it smelled _wrong._ In the silence, under the alien light, under the alien breeze, he rubbed his eyes.

“Maybe he wasn’t,” he said finally. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he couldn’t.”

Padre Tony watched him intently. No one seemed to breathe.

“That’s only maybe, though,” Neville said. “I said I wouldn’t speak for him. That I couldn’t. That’s not… It’s not my prerogative. You might still be right, I don’t know. So  I can only speak for me. For myself. And what I can tell you is this. Everything you just said might be true. But even if it is... It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No." Neville’s voice sounded detached, even to his own ears. "It doesn’t. You think I should be upset by what you just told me because  you think know everything about me. But you don't. You _don't._  I’m not upset because when it comes right down to it… Coming here wasn’t really about my parents. It never was."

 _That_ actually made him blink. It made everybody blink.

“It… Wasn’t?”

"No. It wasn’t. You have your facts," Neville said, turning to face the rows of benches. "Your facts aren't the truth. The _truth_ is that it wasn't Mum and Dad that made the difference to me at all. That made me decide to come here in the end.  You couldn’t know that though, because none of you know _me._  You have no idea, _no_ idea what it’s like to be me, no more than any of you really knew what it was like to be Big Nev. _Because you don't know my context._ Even Big _Nev_ didn’t know my context; he thought he did, we both did, but he didn’t, because we match, but the worlds aren’t the _same_ ! The people aren’t the same _. Just because they match, doesn’t make them the same,_ and _that_ means only two people really know my context, me and God. And as that’s the case... “

He cut himself off, breathing deeply.  It had no effect.

"I’m not stupid,” Neville Longbottom said. “I’m not _stupid,_ alright? I might be nine, but I’m not _stupid_. And that truth in all this, not all of it, but my part of that truth in all this anyway, is that I didn't do it because I thought I had to personally _fix_ everything!" His composure was starting to break, every word rising faster and louder and harder.  “That's not being nine and developmentally … Whatever… That’s thinking you’re better than God again! Big Nev thought so too; he said it wasn’t the kind of Project that could work unless God wanted it to, and now you’re saying that I want to take the _credit_ for it? The responsibility for it? That I’m not _smart_ enough to know the difference between Him and me? That’s just _insulting!”_  He was on his feet now, fists clenched, eyes blazing as he glared the crowds down.  “I’ve spent my whole _life_ telling Him He’s bollocks, and telling him to sh… I mean wee or get off the pot, and He did. He _did._ He _answered._ Uncle Luke said that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and he was right, he _is_ right, because God _proved_ it to me. Even after I called Him bollocks. So don’t you _ever_ say that again. Ever, ever, _ever_ again, because it’s just… _Insulting!”_

“Why did you come, Neville?” Frankie said softly, from his seat.

And Longbottom of Longbottom drew himself up to his full and inconsiderable, heartbreakingly unimposing height.

"Because it was the right thing to do,” he said with dignity. “There was a job that needed doing, and I was there, and when there's a job at hand and you're there, and in a position to do it, or even to help it along, it behooves a man - any man, _every_ man - to Get,  or to Help Get, The Thing Done. Sometimes you’ll succeed. Sometimes you won’t. I didn’t know which would happen. I don’t know now. But I do know this. It wasn’t just the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. Doing anything else… Anything else… Wouldn’t have been Acceptable. And maybe I got myself a little mixed up in my motives there at first.  Everybody does that sometimes, that’s not being a man, that’s being human. But I know this. I didn't do it to be called a _hero.”_

"Why, then?' Frankie said again.

"Because when Big Nev told me that if the Project succeeded - not if _I_ succeeded, but if the _Project_ succeeded - that there would be an eighty five percent chance that he and the others could save my mum and dad, he also told me, though he didn’t know he was telling me because he didn’t know my context again,  that there was a ninety eight percent chance, not of them doing Riddle, but of them saving Uncle Luke. And that if I did my bit in it, it would help.” He caught the bemused looks and tche’d impatiently. “I don’t _care_ about Riddle, alright? Not on the really _personal_ level. He’s nothing to me. He hurt lots of people, but he didn’t hurt me. It was  Bellatrix Lestrange who did that. It was always her, it’s _always_ been her, and always will be, for me at least, and if all of you had a single brain in your heads between you, you would have realized that that’s what it’s been about for Big Nev too, all along. Not about doing Riddle, who was _your_ context. But doing Bellatrix and the Lestrange brothers and Crouch Junior, who were _his_. Ours.”

“So you don’t care if your parents get better?" someone asked.

“Are you _stupid?_ Of course I care! I’ll also, now that I’ve had some time to think about it properly, and I’m sorry if I’m rude, but it’s true... Believe it when I see it. What matters most, though, to me, right now, and mattered most when I decided, even if I did get facts and truth confused for a bit, is that all of this will help Uncle Luke. Uncle Luke, who loves me, and who gives better hugs than any of you probably even know exist -” he stared defiantly at Tony with that one - “and who might have wanted to tell  me to stay, but would never have, not in a million years, not in a million _million_ years, maybe not in your world, but definitely, _absolutely,_ in mine -  told me I wasn’t to go.  Because he would have done exactly the same thing himself. Because he’s the kind of man who does the things that need to be done. The things that need to be done in _every_ context, no matter your world, no matter how important or unimportant anybody thinks they are, anywhere. Just because they do need to be done. The kind of things that work toward the Acceptable.”

He stood, back straight, little shoulders square.

“You - none of you -  know anything about me," he said again, clearly. " _Just because souls match doesn't mean they’re the same_. What you see is never, never all that there is. You made your bets. You took the chance with your facts, and you won.  Congratulations. Well done, all of you. I’m here. Potter is here. But… You made us a promise when you took the chance. When you asked us to take it. To trust you when you promised that even if you couldn’t guarantee that we’d get home, you’d do everything you _could_ do to make it happen. So you can feel good about yourselves if you want. Good about how you got me here, or bad, or whatever. If it helps you, if it makes you feel better, that’s good, that’s nice, alright, I’m not mad, I’m happy for you, really. _But. I. Don't. Care._ I _care_ about you doing what you _promised_ , because where I come from... Where I come from, good people, _Acceptable_ people -  keep their promises.”

He wiped his eyes roughly with his sleeve.

“If you keep your promises,” Longbottom of Longbottom addressed the crowds. “If you do that… That’s enough. You won’t have to save my world. That’s not your bit of the job. So you don’t have to feel guilty about not being able to do it. It’s alright. It’s _alright_ to let God worry about the rest of it, after that. It really, really is. All you have to do now is the bit of the job that’s in front of you, right now. The job of trying to  get me and Potter home. And if you won't do it - not if you _can’t_ do it, but if you _won’t_ do it -  you're all going to have to answer for it. To explain it. To God, and to yourselves too, every single time you look in a mirror. And to each other, and to everyone else, living and dead, who worked to make this happen. So I reckon you need to think about it again. Hard. All of you.  And if you do decide to make the choice not to try - if you decide it’s Acceptable not to keep your promises... Well." He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. "I can't speak for God, only for me, but I'm saying this. For me. On my own behalf. I'll be ashamed of each and every one of you. _Forever._ Because if you were good enough to do all this” - he waved a plump little hand about - “and it _was_ a good thing, a kind thing, even if your motives were a bit wobbly - you're better than that. You. Just. _Are_."

* * *

 

For a moment… Just one split second… Neville thought he had them. For that one split second…

He _did_ have them.

And then the split second passed, and a good ten minutes of split seconds afterwards, all filled with the appropriate murmurings and nods and determined words of resolution and reassurance, and in spite of it all, and in spite of the broad, pleased and triumphant smiles on the face of his family… He knew… He _knew_ … That he’d lost them. The appropriately sympathetic looks were there, the guilty, agonized expressions, the collective aura of resolve shining nobly all around…

And he knew he’d lost.

 _James was right,_ he thought in sick dismay as they all began to collect their things. _It’s too much. They believe me. Now. They know I’m right. Now. They even plan to send us home. Now.  But as soon as they step outside that door…_

He closed his eyes tight, groping desperately in the dark.

_What do I do what do I say what do I…_

And in his mind, one last time, the deep, familiar voice sounded.

 ** _Behind all of the advice I might give you on managing women, or people for that matter, Master Longbottom, there is this again. However paradoxical and impossible it sounds, if you ever are who you are, in_** **truth,** **_no matter how you, or anyone else, arranges the apparent facts so that they see, in you, only what_** **they** ** _wish to see... You cannot fail._**

In Neville’s mind, the paths and levels fell away as dust: path upon path, twist upon turn, layer upon layer, till in all the worlds of all the possibilities, there was only one strand left to follow - pure and shining and stretching far ahead, with a small glimmering light waiting at the end of it and nothing but the black abyss below and all around, with all the stars burnt out and only the darkness left between.

“No,” he said loudly, even as the Minister of Magic stood and shook out his cloak.

“No… What?” He turned inquiringly, smiling pleasantly.

“You haven’t heard what I’ve said. None of you have. You think you have, you believe you have, but you haven’t. So we’re not done yet. _I’m_ not done yet. We’re done when _I_ say we’re done. _Only_ when I say we’re done.” He pointed at the hordes, fingers spread wide, quickly and sharply bringing them together. _“MANETE OMNES!”_

And benches scraped as the good three-quarters of the crowd, now half-risen from their seats, slammed right back down again.

“What the…” Shouts of alarm sounded.

“Sticking charm,” he said grimly, his voice rising and ringing.  “Nobody’s going _anywhere._ Not till I _say._ ”

“My dear boy,” the portrait said soothingly. “You’ve made your point, and most convincingly too, if I do say so myself. I really don’t think that there’s a need for…”

The hand swung around. A single finger pointed.

 _“LACERO CUTEM!”_ A blood-red ray shot out, striking the figure in the portrait right between the eyes. Neat strips of colour peeled away, layer by layer, in a precise cross-hatched pattern, shimmering to multi-coloured dust. _“EVANESCO!”_

And the dust disappeared, leaving only the empty blank canvas and frame. Nine-year-old Neville Frank Longbottom tossed his braid back, turning back to face his utterly shocked and horrified audience as he shook his hand out. The fingertips glowed dark, radiating a sickening, mottled black light.

“Much better,” he said. “And now that I’ve got your _proper_ attention, and as it obviously hasn’t stuck the first time ‘round... Let’s review today’s lessons one more time, shall we?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Manete Omnes - Everyone Stay
> 
> Lacero Cutem - I remove the skin


	7. Reiteration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Longbottom of Longbottom is Very, Very, Very Brave. 
> 
> So Very Brave That It's Going To Take Two Extra Chapters Plus an Epilogue To Get The Thing Done. Again.
> 
> Pls. Note: This chapter references past torture, including a very short descriptive thereof (2 sentences or so).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Margaret: Haven't you done as much as God can reasonably want?  
> More: Well... finally... it isn't a matter of reason; finally it's a matter of love.
> 
> \- Robert Bolt: 'A Man For All Seasons'
> 
> Tony's blessing at the end of the chapter is 1 Corinthians: 13, from the Bible.
> 
> Spanish vocab:
> 
> 'viejo' - old man. Offered as a teasing/affectionate term of endearment, NOT an insult or without respect.

 

**Longbottom Manor**

**April, 2117**

 

 _“LACERO CUTEM!”_  A blood-red ray shot out, striking the figure in the portrait right between the eyes. Neat strips of colour peeled away, layer by layer in a precise cross-hatched pattern before shimmering to multi-coloured dust. _“EVANESCO!”_

And the dust disappeared, leaving only the empty blank canvas and frame. Nine-year-old Neville Frank Longbottom tossed his braid back, turning again to face his utterly shocked and horrified audience as he shook his hand out. The fingertips glowed dark, radiating a sickening, mottled black light.

“Much better,” he said pleasantly. “And now that I’ve got your proper attention, and as it obviously hasn’t stuck the first time ‘round... Let’s review today’s lessons one more time, shall we? First though… Just in case anyone gets ideas…” He concentrated and gestured a third time. Every wand in the room promptly shot out of their startled owners’ holsters, stacking themselves in neat piles on the long table. Neville’s fingers spread over them and snapped together. The table almost seemed to grunt as the wands magically glued themselves to the surface, and each other.

“That should do it.” He caught Potter’s dumbfounded expression. “Yes?’

“What,” Potter said, bewildered. “How…”

“In order to cast a spell wandlessly,” Longbottom recited. ”You must, in the given moment, focus on one thing and one thing only -  your desire to see your spell succeed. If, in that moment, you are able to eliminate all incidental and unrelated thought, emotion, distraction and motive, your magical core will cease to be able to see any other alternatives to your singular instruction, or to physically sense, for that matter, the existence of anything other than your will as it is dictating the parameters of the spell. The force of your raw conviction will effectively replace your wand as your core's focal point."

“Longbottom,” Frankie said quietly. “Are you aware of what you just cast?’

“If you’re talking on the spell I used on the portrait,” the nine-year-old before him said calmly. “Yes. It was the flaying curse.”

“Jesus Christ.” His not-son pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Just… Jesus _Christ."_

“Did you actually kill him, then?” Potter asked tentatively, when no one else present seemed inclined to elaborate on the particular sentiment. “Or did you just send him to another frame, somewhere else?’

“No, he’s gone for good, and I didn’t kill anybody. He wasn’t a person. He - _it -_ was paint in the shape of a person. I reckon you’ve all been a bit confused there,” he addressed the crowd. “If only because the paint involved used the magic involved to tell you otherwise, but now it’s gone, and you have no excuse, none, not to think for yourselves.”

They all just gawped at him, not unlike a herd of deer caught in a Nomajic traffic-jam’s worth of headlights.

“But… Not to. You know. Judge…” Potter ventured again, when, again, they showed no signs of recovery. “Only…  Isn’t that spell typically considered a bit. Erhm. Dark?”

“It is, yes. But there’s always context and applied motive to be taken into account. And there’s nothing inherently immoral on stripping paint, is there?”

“But…”

Longbottom followed his gaze to his still faintly glowing fingers. “Ah. It’s not the nicest colour, no, but colours aren’t evil, are they? The primal human associative equates black with Dark though, and red with blood, so when a spell is designed, those things do manifest on the aesthetic level as a reflection of the original state of mind of the crafter. Think of it as a signpost on the slippery slope you’re traversing when you cast it,” he elaborated at the confused look. “The colour of the spell reminds the caster that since they’re dealing with magic designed by and for really impolite people, they’d best mind their intent if they’ve not got any socially advisable alternatives lined up. And the incantation’s only part of it anyway.  If I‘d wanted to use the curse on a real person, there would have had to be blood involved. The victim’s blood, not mine, but the targeted subject this time didn’t have blood, did it, because again, it wasn’t alive, so I reckon we can just call it an exercise in home improvement and mass psychological liberation and leave it at that. And the sticking charm won’t hurt anybody. It’ll just keep all of you where you are till I’m positive that you understand where I’m coming from.”

“Against our will?” Padre Tony said quietly. He was watching him intently with those dark green, gold-shadowed eyes, his brow furrowed. More than one person was glancing surreptitiously his way, puzzled in their acute alarm, as if waiting for him to explode at the blatant demonstration of Incipient Dark Wankerdom standing before him.

 _“Quod erat demonstrandum._ If you don’t want your children to follow your particular example, don’t set it.”

“How do even you _know_ that spell?” someone demanded when still, Padre Tony said nothing.  “Did Malfoy teach it to you?”

“No, of course not. He’d never teach me something like that. I learned it from Bellatrix Lestrange. Well,” the boy said scrupulously as jaws dropped in renewed collective shock. “The theory of it. I can’t ever see myself in a position where I’d use it the way she was demonstrating it at the time. Unless it was on her, anyway, to show her what I learned That Night. “

“I think,” James said, after another expectant pause as the crowd waited for Padre Tony to object, and he didn’t.  “Please try to understand our point of view here, Longbottom… That we’d appreciate a bit of an explanation there. This is not… I’m sure you can understand that here… Kids… People your age... Erhm. Don’t tend to have the ability to do those spells. Wandlessly or otherwise. Is this typical in your world?’

“No,” Neville said. “But then… I’m not typical. No more,” he said deliberately. “Than Big Nev ever was. At any age.”

“We all knew Uncle Nev pretty well, Longbottom. That’s not the kind of magic he promoted at Hogwarts, if you get my drift.”

“Just because he didn’t promote it or personally indulge in it doesn’t mean he couldn’t do it.”

“At _nine?’_

“It’s not really a question of your age. It’s a question of your ability to focus your magic- that usually comes with age, but not always; an organized mind there really helps, and I’ve always had quite a bit there to organize  - and incentive. Big Nev always had the focus, but he wasn’t dealing with the potential end of the world, was he? And again. I didn’t hurt anybody with it. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t, I don’t think, even if I wanted to. You kind of lose whatever natural inclination you have toward that kind of thing, I reckon, when you see someone cast the Imperius curse on your parents and force them  to skin each other alive while she offers you pointers on their specific technique. Then she heals them up again with more Dark magic, which isn’t even a little bit comfortable, and makes them do it over again until she thinks they’ve got it right.”

Dead silence fell.  

* * *

 

Potter stared at him, horrified. The spider on the front of his shirt actually seemed to be trying to crawl behind the globe it was defending.

“Ace,” he said in a hushed whisper. “What are you _doing?_ You can’t …That’s your pocket stuff! You can’t tell them your pocket stuff!”

“She’s in Azkaban!" another voice called angrily. "You’re saying Bellatrix Lestrange somehow gave you lessons in Dark Magic from Azkaban?’

“It’s alright, Potter. No. I said she taught me That Night. The Night she tortured my parents.”

“You were _sixteen months old!_ Books are one thing, but you cannot possibly remember that far back!”

“My kind of memory lets you remember a lot more than words on a page, yeah? You’d be surprised at what I can remember when I try. And when I don’t.”

“Ace, _no!”_

“I have to do this _,_ Potter," Neville said steadily. "It’s the only way left to us. We’re people in a portrait to them, see? They believe in us - we’re real because they can see us. Because we’re here in front of them.. But everything else… All the people we talk about back home, home _itself…_ They’re stories to them. Background to us. It’s the people who are important in a portrait, not where they come from, yeah?  And now we’ve stepped out of the frame, and the rest is just coloured canvas. And I’m not upset, really I’m not. I do understand. They want to keep us here because their heroes are gone, but they don’t want to live without any. You said it yourself: they’re afraid that they’re not up to the job if necessary, because that’s the way they were raised to think. And Big Harry was old, and Big Nev was old, and they were reaching the ends of their lives and had to go… But we’re here now. And eventually everyone here will have to go too, everybody does, but they don’t want to leave their children without heroes. Without the only heroes that they were told were ever good enough to Get The Thing Done. I don’t think that was necessarily what they had in mind when they brought us here... But it is now. They have an excuse now, to keep us.  And they’re sure that if they want it hard enough, we’ll stay. Because that’s what they think that Big Harry and Big Nev would do. And after we do tell them we’ll stay… Their children will be safe.”

“But…” Potter fought back tears. “It’s the end of the _world!”_

“What does it matter if the world ends, as long as your children are safe? My parents thought that. So did yours. But that can’t be what _we_ take from this.  Because _everybody_ matters. Not just your children, _all_ the children. Everywhere. I reckon… They think that Big Harry would have decided to stay, but that’s because they tried to make him into an Auror, and an Auror would. He wasn’t really an Auror though, was he? He was… Is… A Warder. A real one, maybe even a World Warder, and a World Warder is somebody who takes care of _everything_ , in advance if possible, not just the bad job in front of him in the moment. Because they know it’s the only thing to do. The only acceptable thing to do. No matter what.”

He pulled a chair over and sat down. Potter buried his face in his scrawny little hands.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he said, muffled. “I _really_ wish you wouldn’t, Ace. It’s not _right.”_

“I know, Potter. But it’s still got to be done. I was sixteen months old That Night,” he said to the crowd. “Like you said.  I was in my high chair when they got there. They left me there. To watch. I watched the whole thing. After, when the Aurors came, they took me to St. Mungo’s. Gran was worried. I didn’t… I wasn’t talking, or responding or anything. They called it catatonia.”

No one said a thing.

“The healers,” he continued. “They suggested Obliviators. From St. Dymphna’s. That’s the best place. They brought some in. Gran was worried. They told her the risks. I was a baby. The neural paths for memories weren’t done. But.”

He clenched his fists inside his wine-coloured sleeves. Tony watched him intently.

“They bollocksed it up,” he said in a small, clear voice. “I was alright at first. They thought it worked. I got better. And something happened when I was four. It was like I started waking up. And I started remembering again. Things from That Night at first. Not just dreams, but memories. And then I realized I wasn’t just remembering That Night. I was remembering everything. Everything I read, everything I heard. And it never stopped. And it went back. The first things I remembered were the things they had tried to make me forget. Like a recording in my head. I remember hearing them tell Gran in the hospital. That if it didn’t work, I’d be crazy for sure. Like my parents. And it hadn’t worked after all, but I didn’t want to be crazy, so I just… Didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell anybody.”

“You’re saying that this happened to _Gramps?”_ Astra looked as if she was about to be sick.

“Yes. It was how I knew he was really me.  I wasn’t going to come here unless I was sure. We compared notes. On That Night.”

Longbottom of Longbottom lifted his chin, looking around the great room, meeting the hundreds of eyes before him squarely.

“This is who I am,” he said quietly. “Who Big Nev was. We are what That Night made us. But he wasn’t evil. _I’m_ not evil. But evil things… Not just bad things, but evil things… They don’t _leave_ you. You can’t forget them. Ever.” He chose his words carefully, speaking slowly and deliberately. “They… Experiencing things like we did, seeing the things that we saw on That Night… You’d think they’d make you crazy, and evil yourself, but really, it’s about balance again, right? Everything has to balance to come out even. And when you get to visit the people you love most in the world twice a month, for your whole life, and _remember_ , and be reminded  again and again and again,  just what that kind of evil - what the things were that were done  to the people you love - can do… _Have_ done…  It balances _you,_ so that the things you saw don’t make you evil. They just make you determined that it will never, never, never happen again. To anybody. Because the proof is right _there_ , that are there are always worse things than dying. In this context…” He gestured around. “Our world might end. Everybody, all five billion people on it could die. But they’d _be_ dead, wouldn’t they? So the things that would be worse than that, in this context, would have to be happening _here_. And that worse thing would be that _everybody here would have those people dying because of them in their heads their whole lives._ The knowledge that they _did_  let it happen, along with the understanding that they could have prevented it, and they still chose to let it happen. They didn’t just sit and watch, like I did.   _They. Made. It. Happen._ They…” He turned to face the crowds again. “You… Would  have to live knowing that you were just as bad as Tom Riddle ever was. And you’ll have to live knowing that instead of rescuing us from him… You _became_ him. All of you. Every single one of you. And that in the end, if this is the choice that you make... “ He looked around the room squarely. “If this is the choice that you make… He’ll have won the war after all. He’ll have had to wait over a hundred years for it, but he’ll still have won. D’you reckon, maybe… Even a little… That he might be happy about that? And proud of you for it, that in the end… You’ll have done it to yourselves?”

Again, Potter struggled against tears. Neville turned to face him.

“It’s not how I am,” he said again. “I’m not evil. But they’re not _listening,_ Potter. They’re not _hearing_ me. The only way left, then, to make them understand, is to show them. If they can’t hear me, and I show them… They’ll see.”

“Uh?”

Neville closed his eyes.

**_"Nobody's going to hear about it from me. Ever. I swear it, Uncle Luke. I swear it as Longbottom."_ **

_If it was the only way to save my life… He said he’d tell._

_And he never said that I couldn’t tell, if it was the only way to save_ his _. He just said to remember that there was more to every situation than there appears again. And there’s no way he could have known about this. This bit, that’s more than what he saw. More than he could see. Could ever imagine. If he had… He wouldn’t have asked me to promise. Because_ he _wouldn’t have promised._

“My memories,” Neville Longbottom said. “Of my world. Of the people in my world. If I show you, you’ll all be there. You’ll see it’s real. It will make it real for you. You’ll see that here _is_ there, no matter the side of the Gate you start from. That when it comes down to it… We’re you, and you’re us. We’re not the same, any of us, but we’re still One.  But to really see it… You’ll have to go through the Gate yourselves. And the best way to do that is to go through me. I have to be the Gate. “

* * *

 

“What?” Potter squeaked. _“What?”_

“All they know is what they know,” Neville said doggedly. His stomach hurt, badly, but he ignored it steadfastly. “All that they know is what they’ve _known._ They’ve worked on the Project for thirty _years._ Maybe their motives were mixed… But in the end, they did understand. That everything’s a part of everything else. That everything’s essential to everything else, and everybody and everything matters. They understood it well enough, all of them, to start a miracle together. And now…  Now, all else aside, they should get to see the results. It’s only fair. It’s only right. And once they see it… See our side of it… They’ll remember what they’ve forgotten. That they started a miracle. And that they have the power together to finish it. And the Thing will get Done.”

“But they’ll have to see what’s inside your _head!”_

“Yes,” Longbottom of Longbottom said. “They will. “

“That’s _private,_ Ace! Telling them is one thing, but _showing_ them? Heads are private for a _reason!”_

“It’s not _about_ reason. I told you that already. If I don’t do this, it’ll be me throwing them into the dark. Letting them walk into it, anyway.  Forever. To _live_ there, the way _I_ live there. All the time. And I don’t want anybody there with me. It’s one thing if you’re there and you find other people who are already there to hold your hand, but to invite them in? To hold the door for them, or even to stand aside and let them walk in, without trying to stop them? No. No, I can’t do that. I won’t do that. If I want them to care about the people on our world, I have to care about the people who live here too.  And if this is the only way left to us… To make them understand… It’s a price I’m willing to pay. It’s no price at all. It’s …” He pushed his hair back. “It’s a gift. I can make what I went through… Into a gift. To save other people.” He forced a crooked little smile. “I reckon that might tick Bellatrix off. Pretty sure that wasn’t her intent at all, yeah? Maybe... Maybe turning it all around is a way for me to do her after all.”

Potter scrubbed at his eyes.

“They shouldn’t make you do it,” he said inadequately. “Now that they know you’re willing."

“Oh well,” Longbottom said. “Intent’s all well and good, but it’s still nice to see the magic at the end of it. And they should really meet Uncle Luke too. I reckon if you’re an army that’s going to stop a war, it’s only right that you meet your _real_ General.”

“Neville,” Frankie said from his seat. “You need to think about something before you make your final decision there.”

“What?”

"You’re nine,” he said. “The kind of magic you’re talking on… You can’t do it without a wand. You’re bound to have mixed feelings on the primal level that requires focus, so you trying wandless… It’s not safe. Too much can go wrong. And since you can’t use a wand, you’ll have to let someone who can use a wand extract them for you. And that means… That person could  see everything. Could see… Anything. Not just what you want them to see.”

For the first time, Neville looked genuinely and openly uncertain. Apprehensive.

“Can you do it?"

“No, honey,” Frankie said. “I can’t. I don’t have enough magic, and you have to be specially trained besides. It would have to be someone else.”

There was a small pause.

“You mean Padre Tony.”

“There are others, but he’d be the one I’d choose, yeah. The one I’d choose for you.”

Neville’s mouth twisted a bit, but in the end, he turned to the priest. “And no matter what you see… You can’t tell, right?”

“That’s right,” Tony said. “But I don’t…” He rubbed his neck.  ”I‘m not supposed to… It’s one thing to look, under the monitored and prescribed circumstances. It’s another thing to show other people, even with your permission. It’s not about your permission, it’s about my promises to God. My vows.”

“It’s the end of the world, Padre. If I stay here, even if the world doesn’t end… It’s ended for me. Maybe it’s selfish, but I reckon that when it comes right down to it, God would understand. Can you get a judicial pensieve? As opposed to a regular one?”

“What’s the difference?’ Potter asked, before Tony could reply.

“With a regular one, you just stick your head in the bowl to watch an extracted memory. With a judicial one, there’s a live link created between you and the bowl that  projects the memories you’re thinking on onto a big magical screen while you’re thinking about them, so that nobody can say anyone modified them after the fact and before review. There’s a potion that you take so you can’t redirect or lie while you’re remembering in the moment, and the screen makes a copy of whatever you show at the same time, for the official record. I’ve never seen one, and it’s not used often at all because the potion’s really, really expensive and the subject has to pay for it,  but I read about it in the paper, when they were finally reviewing Sirius Black’s case, and Peter Pettigrew’s testimony. He- Sirius - had the money to pay for both of them, and he did.”

“Harry left a few vials in storage at the family vault,” Gin volunteered. “For family emergencies again, or for people we’d have thought needed them, but who couldn’t pay. We could run over and get them if you like, and it wouldn’t put Longbottom out of pocket, Frankie.”

“I reckon we’ve already been paid,” Frankie said dryly. “One way or the other, since Dad probably made them for him. Uncle Harry never trusted anyone else for that sort of thing, and the costs go to the brewer, not the Ministry.”

“I’ll do it too,” Potter said abruptly.

_“What?”_

“No,” Neville said immediately. “You won’t.”

“But Ace…”

“It’s not necessary, Potter. Nobody needs to see your memories to know what happened to you is real; they have your hospital records for that. So you wouldn’t be doing it for them. You’d be doing it for me. And I don’t need you to do it. Or want you to. If you ever tell me about what happened to you, or show me… It’ll be because  you trust me. Because you want me to know, as your friend. Not because you think you have to. It’ll be another gift.”

“Memories like that are a _gift?"_

“They can be when they’re freely given, yeah. Like I said. I reckon… They’re the best gift you can give. To share them with someone.”

“They’re making you give them yours! That’s stealing!"

“They’re not _making_ me do _anything”_   he said again, patiently. “I’m _offering._ And they don’t get to see the ones of That Night anyway.  They’re not necessary to make my point, and nobody needs to see that anyway.”

“Would you show them to me, if you trusted me? Since we’re friends?’

“No. It has nothing to do with trust. It’s just… It’s not stuff that happened to me. I watched, but it’s stuff that happened to my parents. I wouldn’t want anyone seeing me go through that if I were them, so it’s not mine to give, see? Padre Tony seeing it… It‘s the side effect of the necessary spell. And he won’t tell anybody. He can’t.”

Potter nodded. Unhappily.

“Is there something you _would_ you like to see?" Neville asked him, after a moment.

“What?”

“I can’t give you That Night. It’s not mine to give, like I said. But  I have to start with one memory, and I can let you choose what it is. Because we are friends. And I do trust you. With all of me that _is_ mine to give.”

Eyebrows flew up all over the hall. Longbottom didn’t say anything more, but the corner of his mouth quirked up in a completely unmistakable manner as he stuffed his hands in his pockets and held Potter’s eyes. Oddly, he noted... The gesture seemed to make his tense stomach hurt less. The quirk edged up a little further as he watched Potter turn  the colour of an overripe tomato.

“Good _golly,”_ Scorpius mumbled. “Precocious doesn’t even begin to cover it, does it?  That’s just…”

“Unsubtle?” Al murmured back. “Though I reckon that answers _that_ question once and for all. Is it just me, or can you feel your dad blushing from the After too?”

“Do you have any pets?’ Potter asked, his red not fading noticeably.

“No. Well, sort of? There’s a hedgehog who lives in our greenhouse. I found him last summer when he was a baby. He was almost dead. He’s all black. Melanistic. His mum wouldn’t take care of him. I brought him to the gardener, and he helped me get him stronger, and he stayed. Gran said that if he survived… Hedgehogs normally live about five to seven years. She said with magic to help him a bit, he could live ten or so. She said she would make the arrangements for me to take him to Hogwarts. Her friend Professor McGonagall teaches there, and she’s good friends with the Herbology professor, Professor Sprout. They’d find a place for him, since everybody’s allowed a pet. Hedgehogs aren’t usual, but they’re lots less bother than cats or owls.”

“Does he have a name?’

“Thorin. Because he’s all prickly, and I found him under an oak tree. And he's really small, like a dwarf.” He considered. “He looks a bit like your hair, actually. No gold tips, though.”

Potter laughed.

“It’s a good place to start,” Neville conceded. He turned to Padre Tony. “So? Will you do it?"

Tony looked him over carefully.

“You sure you want it to be me,” he said. “There are other options, and Frankie’s recommendation aside… These things are really best done when the parties concerned are clear on where they stand with each other.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“I’m not stupid, _button.”_ That last was quite deliberate. “You’ve been polite about it, but  I know you don’t really like me. I’m not offended,” he added, at the rather austere and disapproving Look. “So there’s no need to get your fuckin’ ‘these things are really best discussed in private, Padre’ glare on. Not a lot of people do at first. The dichotomy of the priesthood and the seventy foot serpentine does tend to strike at the heart of the instinctive conflicted.”

“It’s not about like or dislike,” Longbottom said repressively. “It’s about trust. And even then, I’m not trusting you as a person. I don’t know you well enough to know if I can do that.  But I do know that I can trust you as a priest. And for the record, that’s because of your form, not in spite of it.”

“It is, is it? How do you figure that?”

 _“That,_ we can talk about later. It’s private.” He concentrated, screwing up his round little face with it, and flicked his fingers. From the stack on the table, two wands sprang out and reappeared in Tony Silva’s holsters. “You can get up. I’ve unstuck you.”

For a moment, Tony didn’t move, just put his face in his hands. He breathed deeply, and stood.  

“Alright. Here’s what we’re going to do. You and me are going to step out and do this first part in private. We don’t need a live link; copies of your memories will do just as well, and I’m not doing the extractions  in front of fuckin’ everybody. Not with what you’ve got going on in there, and who knows what will happen when it comes down to it? I’m not feeding the fuckin’ jackals here one bit more than their pre-designated allotment, and why yes, if any of you are offended by that, I _am_ referring to you.”

"No," Neville said. “I want you to do it all here.”

“Why?”

“Because they need to see it while it is happening. Like in the courts, so nobody will be able to think that I’m paraphrasing. I’m not giving one person, not _one,_ any room at all to say that I’m a liar. I’m not, and they know I’m not, but there’s too much at stake here. Whatever it takes… My dignity doesn’t come into it.”                                  

“You’re something fuckin’ else.” His voice was rough. “Alright. Ma has access to the necessary, she was Supreme Mugwump and is still a World Warder, so she can have clearance over the DMLE. Will you release her on my word, so she can go get it?”

Two more wands shot out. Carlotta Hernandez de Silva stood, and made her way to the front. Instead of flashing out there, she looked down at the small boy in front of her…

And blurred. A lean and wiry spotted jaguar, long-limbed and moving a bit delicately with age, blinked slowly at him.

“Oh, that’s so nice!” Neville was enchanted. “You’re so beautiful! Jaguars are the national animals of Brazil, aren’t they?”

She blurred back. “They are,” she said. “Though only my papi was from Brazil. My mami was from Colombia, and I lived there for the majority of my childhood, so I speak with a Spanish accent, not a Portuguese one.”

“Does Big Nev speak Portuguese?” he asked, diverted. “He didn’t say.”

 _“Sim._ He does, actually, after all the years of working in Brazil. And he was very good friends with my great-aunt Consuela, so he is reasonably fluent in Spanish as well. She was the Headmistress at Castelobruxo, and as he was Headmaster of Hogwarts,  they had, aside from the family connection through Frankie and my Toninho, an ongoing professional relationship.”

“And Big Harry?’

“He speaks  both like a native. My _Tio_ Miguel was as his father: his first teacher in Warding from the time he was a young man, and though he spoke excellent English, he preferred his own languages.” She smiled a little sadly. “It was no trial for _Viejo,_ certainly -  that is what I called Big Harry - but as we all know now, he did try to be accommodating whenever possible.” She kissed her son’s cheek. “Be right back, bebe.”

She flashed out. Tony concentrated. His clothes shimmered, and he was suddenly  in full ecclesiastical vestments.

"That’s very neat,” Neville said. “And you look very nice, but you really don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. If you’re trusting me as a priest, you’re gonna get a priest. Now. Here’s what we’re gonna do once we get started. I’m gonna need you to look me right in the eyes. You’re gonna see a door in your head. You’ll hear a knock. That’s me. Picture yourself opening the door. And you have to invite me in. That’s important. I can’t - won’t - go in unless you give me permission. Behind you will be a hall. You’re gonna take my hand, and turn around, and there’ll be an arrow. Picture yourself following the arrow, and…”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Uh?’

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but that’s not how it works. There’s a wheel,” he said. “A big one. I spin it, and it lands on the right memory. And then we’re just… In it.  Sometimes the arrow moves a bit before it settles. That’s when you’d see other memories, and I have to spin it again till it listens and settles. I’ve had lots of practice though, so it shouldn’t be that bad, really.”

“Your head, your call. The door’s still a necessity though. Any other concerns?”

“Am I going to see any of your memories?” Neville asked. “Only I won’t talk about them if I do, but I’ve heard that can happen, and  I’d like to know.”

“You might,” he said. “But nothing crucial, and they’d be my memories. Nothing  that anyone else has told me or Jesus in confidence. We priests have special ways of protecting those.” No sooner had the words left his mouth than Neville's eyes sharpened, focusing intently on him.

“You mean, like with wards in your head?"

"Something like, yeah. Why, is that a thing in your world?’

“Not that I know of. I was just wondering if ordinary people can get them. People who aren’t priests.”

“Uh?"

“Something - or someone -  Uncle Luke mentioned. You’ll see. He said one of his favourite professors at Castelobruxo was a priest. His student advisor. I was just thinking. If he arranged him wards, he wouldn’t be a natural Occlumens at all, the way I thought he’d have to be, to keep Riddle out of his head all those years. He’d have magic wards in his brain instead.”

“It’s possible,” the priest said. “But not likely, button. Those measures aren’t usually done on laypeople. The measures you have to take if you’re not a priestly candidate are…”

He stopped abruptly.

“Are what?’

“Tony?" Frankie said. “What is it?’

“Nothing,” his best friend said, and then, abruptly again…  “I want to see everything you got on your Uncle Luke, okay, kid? Every last detail you got, but especially the ones that relate to his time in South America.”

“That could take awhile.” Neville looked doubtful. “The last time we visited, he stayed for hours and hours. All night, almost, and all the bits you’re talking on went all around our conversations.”

“It’s important. And I’m suddenly getting the feeling it won’t be boring.”

“Alright.” Neville eyed the crowd. “If I unstick you all so you can use the loo or whatever if you need to, will you all promise to behave?’

“Oh, they’ll behave,” Tony said grimly. “If they don’t, they’ll be facing Don Vito jaws first. Then they’re gonna get a hug from Jesus that they’ll never fuckin’ forget.”

“Don Vito?’

“My call name as a titanoboa. Don Vito Corleone, from  the Nomajic movie ‘The Godfather’. Head of his family, and he appreciated good manners too.”

“How does that work with you with all the swearing?” Longbottom of Longbottom inquired with interest. “Just out of curiosity?’ Sniggers ran all around at that.

“I get an ongoing dispensation on expressing myself,” the priest said dryly. “For all the fuckin’ shit they put me through. I don’t know what it’s like in your time and world, but  it’s not easy being a traditionally Christian role model in this day and age, and you’ve seen me Changed besides. Repression really wouldn’t be good for anybody there.”

“Offer it up?" he suggested. “For the souls of the faithfully departed?”  Guffaws rang out.

“The faithfully departed aren’t the ones I worry on. You sure you’re not a Catholic?’

“No. I mean, yes. I’m sure. Gran’s best friend is the head of the C of E, after all, and it wouldn’t be polite to let the side down there.”

There was another crack, and Carlotta reappeared.

“Any problems?’ her son inquired

She waved that off and began to arrange the various paraphernalia… Several people disappeared, presumably to the loo, but returned promptly and decorously.  Potter boosted himself up on the table again, in a spot with no wands, as Tony transformed the empty portrait frame to a large, curved and padded bench that looked remarkably like a church pew. He placed it at an angle to the table, and pointed to the wall with his wands. The huge window behind it glimmered and washed over. When it solidified, it looked exactly like a Nomajic movie screen. Carlotta levitated the Pensieve over before the bench, as one of the Potter elves popped in carrying a leather case containing the potions that Gin had had him fetch from the family vault.

“What do they taste like?” Neville asked Carlotta nervously. “And what do they make you feel like?’

“They are quite pleasant,” the former Supreme Mugwump reassured him. “I have taken one or two in my time. Herbal, shall we say, and you will feel very calm and relaxed. Altogether in control of yourself, but very relaxed. The images in your mind will be very clear and precise, as the world after a good hard rain, mm? Before we begin, you will take this, please.” She held out a vial.

“What is it?’

“It is a potion that will determine whether or not you have any allergies to the ingredients in the rest. You will drink it, and we will wait several minutes, and then you will prick your thumb on this specially prepared parchment here - “ She held up an officially sealed scroll - "and it will read the results.”

In spite of himself, Neville looked over at Tony. He nodded reassuringly.

“I’ll get rid of it myself after,” he promised. “We’re not gonna be leaving anything with your blood lying around, I promise.”

He took a deep breath, his round little face suddenly pale and absolutely terrified. Potter slid down, and came over, and took his hand.

“I’m here for you, Ace,” he said loudly. “I’ll Stand with you, okay? Till the Thing’s Got Done.” He turned to the crowds. “Just so you know,” he said. “I understand why he’s doing this. And why you need it. But I still think it’s rubbish. You’re _grown-ups.”_ His voice was utterly scathing and disdainful. “And you all said that you wanted us to come here, to me anyway, because kids shouldn’t have to fight wars. That it was the grown-ups’ job. You’re lucky it’s him and not me. I reckon if it _was_ me, I’d still do it, but I’d give you all something to remember for my efforts, and it wouldn’t be polite either.”

“Now, now, Potter,” Neville said in spite of himself. “Your Aunt Petunia would be absolutely appalled to hear you talking like that. Ap- _palled,_ I say!”

And despite themselves, they both erupted into fits of hysterical giggles. When they recovered…

“Ah, yes,” Potter managed. “Your Gran too, prolly."

“No,” Neville disagreed. “Not Gran. She’d be right in there with you. Wand first. And she wouldn’t be hexing them with it.”

“How very fuckin’ lovely.” Padre Tony rolled his eyes as Potter collapsed into giggles again. “Shall we?"

“Um.” Neville sobered abruptly, took the vial Carlotta offered him, and before he could stop himself, gulped it down. His eyes crossed and he stuck his tongue out at Potter. Potter nearly fell on the floor laughing. The spider on his shirt rolled on its back and waved its limbs in mirth. Tony hauled him up.

“Sit.” He pointed at the bench. Potter sat, obligingly. “Hand, please," he said to Neville.

Neville stuck his hand out obligingly. Tony nicked it and squeezed it on the parchment. Neville sucked at the offended thumb a bit, peering as lines slowly etched themselves.

“You’re clear,” the priest informed him - then hesitated, just for a moment.

“What is it?’ Neville asked, as he opened the case of vials and inspected it. He started as…

“Toninho, what are you doing?’ his mother said, alarmed.

“We’re gonna do this together,” the priest told the boy before him as he put down the first emptied vial. “In turns. I got a few complementary memories, I guess, that they should all see too. Or remember, anyway, from my perspective; I’m sure they all do remember the details since there was such a big hullabaloo surrounding it back in the day. They asked me for interviews then and I never gave them, but now… We won’t call it an interview. We’ll call it a sermon. It might clear up a few things anyway. And provide a bit of proof and perspective on matters concerning.”

Neville owled up at him. “You believe me?” he said uncertainly. “Before we ever get started?’

“Yes,” Tony Hernandez de Silva said shortly. “I do. I never didn’t believe you. I’m not gonna lie. I was against the Project from the beginning, but it needs to be finished, for more reasons than you know. And I’m going to show everyone those reasons now. It’ll explain too, why I never read Uncle Harry and Uncle Nev the riot act over it all. Why I kept my mouth shut there. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I’ll answer to Jesus for it, I’m sure, all things considered. But there was a reason, and you’re all about to find out.”

“Erhm,” Longbottom of Longbottom said. “Alright, then. If you’re sure.”

“I am,” he said, and shook himself, handing over a second vial. “Down the hatch, and on your knees.”

“What?’

“Protocols.”

He downed obediently, and arranging his robes, knelt gingerly and not a little self-consciously. Padre Tony closed his eyes, crossed himself and put his hands on the shining brown head.

“In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he said. Neville cocked his ear. Yes, he thought. The ‘s’s there were definitely a bit more hissy. “Amen. ‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It  always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Neville looked up at him. His lips quirked, a bit crookedly it was true.

 **“** Love never fails,” the priest continued. “But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

He removed his hands and looked down. Tilted the round little chin up.

“First thing I’m gonna say to your parents,” he said deliberately and clearly. “When I meet them, wherever and whenever that might be… Is that they raised themselves, even as they are… A fuckin’ _man._ A fuckin’ _Warder.”_

“You can’t have him, Silva,” Stella said firmly. “I finally found someone else in the family besides Dad who can grow grass, and I’m not letting him go.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Tony helped Neville up and led him to the pew. They settled themselves, Potter squirming over to put a scrawny little arm around Neville’s waist as he did so. “Okay. Here we go.” He  popped his wands. “Have some respect,” he addressed the audience. “For him, if not me, and keep your traps shut till we’re done. He’s fuckin’ braver than all of you put together, and he rates that.”

*What if somebody wants to ask me questions, though?” Neville asked, diverted. “As we go?”

“Then they can raise their fuckin’ hands, and we’ll press pause. But it’d better be important, or Don Vito will hug them. With his teeth, can you fuckin’ say amen.” Tony touched his wand to his forehead, and pulled. A silvery strand appeared; he linked it to Neville’s own forehead before drawing out a secondary strand from the first,  touching it to the black surface of the bowl. “Close your eyes, now, and you’ll see the first door.”

Neville closed, cautiously… And jumped.

“That’s so neat!” he said in delight. “It’s the doors to St. Paul’s!”

“Jesus save me. You couldn’t visualize a Catholic church at least?"

“I’ve never been in a Catholic church. Gran wouldn’t do that to the Queen. It would be rude, and she’s my godmother besides.’

_“What?’_

“Unofficially. On the Nomaj side. Well, the Nomaj friend side, anyway. She’s very nice, even if her corgis are a bit scary. And she has really nice gardens. Prince Charles and I had a lovely walk-through the last time we visited, while Gran and she had tea. He’s a bit sad because he doesn’t have children or grandchildren who really like gardens either, at least growing them rather than just admiring them, so we got on very well.“

“Are you fuckin’ havin’ me on, Longbottom?"

“I can show you the memory,” Longbottom offered. “We _are_ right here.”

“After the hedgehog,” Potter said firmly. “You said we could see the hedgehog first.”

“Alright.” Neville scrunched his face, concentrating. Up on the screen, the huge doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral appeared. A figure in full ecclesiastical vestments mounted the steps, and knocked crisply.

There was a pause, and the doors opened a bit.  Potter’s eyes grew huge as a small boy in a beautiful black Sunday suit and neatly combed hair peered out.

“Hullo,” Memory-Neville greeted his guest. “Come in, then. Don’t mind the choir, they practice every day at this time. We’ll just go straight through - around the side, if you don’t mind, not down the middle, since they might all get confused on why a Catholic priest is here -  and go around behind the pulpit. The door to the greenhouses are there.”

“Sounds good,” Padre Tony said amiably, and as he stepped through… “Nice suit.”

“Thank you,” Memory-Neville said. “It’s Ferrante, not St. Roux, but he doesn’t do Nomaji clothes. Just wizarding styles. So we make do.” He looked closer. “Not to be rude, but are all your clothes made of snakeskin?”

“Waste not, want not. I shed twice a year, and seventy feet is a lot of boot leather. Never mind that every bit helps when you take the vow of poverty.”

“Mm,” Memory-Neville agreed. “I imagine it would. This way, please.” He paused. “Plain poverty? No untoward adjectives?’

“Not in church, muffin. I got that much down, anyway.”

_“Muffin? Really?”_

“I like muffins,” the priest said, and tweaked his ear as they walked. “Especially English muffins.”

“We call them crumpets here,” Memory-Neville informed him. _“Honestly!_ And that is not a suggestion,” he added hastily. “Or even an option, so you can get calling me that out of your head right now.”

Padre Tony snorted with laughter as they rounded the pulpit. There was another door there. Mounted on it was a wheel, though in truth it looked more like the lens of a kaleidoscope, filled with constantly and rapidly shifting patterns of colour. A graceful silver arrow was mounted in the middle, pointing straight up to the top. Memory-Neville took a deep breath. The priest held out his hand.

“I got you,” he reassured him. “Remember, they’ll see the absolute truth of whatever it is that you show them, but they won’t see anything that you truly don’t want them to see. It doesn’t work that way normally, but because you’re linked with me, I’ll sense when you’re approaching something that you’re uncomfortable with revealing, and I’ll cut it off.”

Memory-Neville took his hand, clutching, but didn’t move. Tony turned and knelt before him, taking his hands in his.

“Tell me,” he said gently. “I know what’s bugging you, since we _are_ in each other’s heads, but you still gotta say it. You need to say it. You can see me now. You can feel me. You know I’m not gonna judge. That I’m not judging. And it needs to be said, before we get started.”

“I’m scared, Padre Tony,” he said in a very small voice. “It’s really scary in there. I don’t want you to hate me. Or to think that I’m bad, just because I know the things I know. I’m not. I’m _not.”_

“I know you’re not, button,” the man before him said quietly. “Trust me on that. I know evil. And you’re not it.”

“How can you be sure?” Memory-Neville persisted. “How can you be really, really _sure?”_

“Because we’re here. You really think that if you were evil, that the front lobby to your mind would be a fuckin’ cathedral?”

“Is that indicative?’

Padre Tony laughed. It was not a particularly mirthful sound.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. It is. Trust me on that one. It sure as fuckin’ hell is. People’s front lobbies… They don’t have control over that much, anyway. They just… Are what they are.”

“Examples? I mean, if you can tell me. If it’s allowed.”

“I can do that much, for a few particulars anyway. I know they wouldn’t mind.  Big Harry told me once that his was a train station. King’s Cross. Stel’s is her first greenhouse - her parents built it for her when she was ten.  Frankie’s is his kitchen-of-the-day. My _Tio_ Gabriel’s was the garden in the seminary where he’d started his own path to the priesthood. He never made it there, though. He met my great-great Auntie Consuela at my great grandfather ‘Tonio and my great grandmother Inez’ wedding, and there went that. They got married in the garden anyway, and all of their children were baptized there.”

“What’s yours?’

“You’ll see. We’ll take turns, like I said. Though with me, there won’t be a door. There will be, eventually, but you might have to wait on it a bit, after you knock, and make do with the window I’ll set up there. I’ll be inside, but I’ll be in no condition to answer at first. I never am when I find myself there.”

Memory-Neville  nodded. Padre Tony rose and squeezed his hands, releasing the right. The boy squared his shoulders.

“Alright," he said. “Alright. Let’s Get This Thing Done.”

And his round little face scrunched in concentration, and he reached out, and up, and the arrow spun.


End file.
